Eight Months on Ghazzah Street FROM THE PUBLISHER
When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It's all in her imagination, she's told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Set in Saudi Arabia during the boom created by soaring oil prices in the 1980s, this sinuously crafted tale by Hawthorndon Award winner Mantel (for An Experiment in Love) uses the outsider status of a British woman and the minutiae of her daily life to mask and eventually reveal a chilling situation. Mantel builds a sense of disorientation, claustrophobia and paranoia in rendering the abysmal quotidian existence of Frances Shore. A cartographer, Frances has followed her civil engineer husband, Andrew, to the Red Sea port Jidda, where he is engaged in a lucrative construction project. Shunning the expatriate housing compound, the Shores move into a grim four-flat building on Ghazzah Street. Shut out from practicing her profession by the severe, ultra-sexist legal code of Saudi Islam, Frances writes in a journal and observes a domestic scene that comes to seem more and more ominous as she struggles to define the ever-shifting line between private morality and public order. A nonperson in the Muslim world, Frances is unable to break through a wall of prejudice about Westerners to come to a common understanding with her neighbors. She becomes hyperconscious of suspicious goings-on in their building, including a shadowy figure carrying a gun in the hallway. This story of a place where puzzles are "more apparent than real" ends provocatively with more questions than answers. Mantel's relentless pounding away at Frances's stultifying life offers a bit of misdirection, enabling the mystery to sneak towards its conclusion with disconcerting stealth. With marvelously understated wit, Mantel chronicles a world of teas and dinner parties that eventually coalesce into a sinister story of horror just beyond a veil. (Aug.) FYI: Mantel was only the third woman to win the Hawthorndon award in its 80-year history.
Library Journal
Both of these volumes offer some unusual doings. Change (1994) finds a former missionary wife and husband dealing with the latter's affair. The incident brings up a hidden evil the couple encountered in Africa 20 years earlier, of which neither one spoke. Ghazzah Street (1988) has protagonist Frances Shore relocating to Saudi Arabia. In her apartment each night she swears she hears weeping and voices in the apartment above her, but her neighbors insist it is empty. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This excellent British novelist, winner of Britain's Hawthornden Prize, makes her U.S. debut with these two trade paperback editions. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street tells in harrowing, you-are-there style the story of a British cartographer who follows her engineer husband to a job in Saudi Arabia. The claustrophobic world in which she finds herself is hostile to expatriate workers and particularly to women, and the isolated apartment building in which they live seems to hide ominous secret affairs. Frances struggles to understand the lives of her Muslim neighbors but is deeply disturbed by the climate of fear around her. A Change of Climate concerns the loss of faith of an upright Christian couple, Ralph and Anna, who have raised their four children and led exemplary lives but are haunted by a missionary trip to Africa in their youth. Mantel does a superb job of re-creating these foreign cultures as seen through British eyes and has a precise insight into the vagaries of humanity that will delight Barbara Pym fans.Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Gabriele Annan
Mantel is the blackest of black comedians; she can make your flesh creep with horror and especially with the apprehension of it. Her approach is slow and stealthy; the hair on the back of your neck rises.
-- The New York Review of Books
Kirkus Reviews
A chilling portrait of an authoritarian society as a young Englishwoman moves with her husband into a Saudi Arabian neighborhood and finds murder lurking behind the shuttered windows and closed doors.
Mantel's third novel, published in 1988 in England and now being issued here (along with her sixth—see above—also previously unseen here), splendidly evokes the constrained life of the expats in a feudal Islamic society where boredom is endemic, rumors of rebellion commonplace, and the police feared. Andrew, a civil engineer, and Frances met and married in Africa but come to Jeddah—a place of blinding heat, ugly buildings, and underlying menace—when Andrew accepts a job with an international construction company. The company owns the apartment the Shores move into; it happens to be in an Arab neighborhood, and Frances is largely isolated. She begins a diary recording her impressions; makes friends with Yasmin and Samira, two young married Islamic women on the block; and wonders about the supposedly empty apartment above hers and Andrew's, from which she's certain that she's heard sobbing. Yasmin and Samira, western-educated but strong defenders of Islam, tell her the apartment belongs to a powerful Saudi man who's installed his mistress there. As the months pass, Frances tries to adjust to a society where women are treated as inferiors and the slightest infraction of Islamic law can lead to imprisonment, or worse. She sees men with rifles in the streets outside and is sure Yasmin and Samira are lying to her—suspicions that prove horrifyingly right when a British guest of theirs is murdered, Yasmin's husband is shot, and Frances's neighbors turn out to have bloody secrets of their own.
At once a riveting thriller and a subtle political tale, set in a place as harsh and unforgiving as the desert.
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