The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Iraq: They Came To Baghdad by Agatha Christie

A Cold War thriller that eschews the usual adversaries, They Came To Baghdad by Agatha Christie offers an outlandish but high-energy plot told with a few winks. Agatha Christie’s own experiences of Iraq (the book was written there), including her stays at several excavations led by her husband, Max Mallowan, infuse the descriptions of Baghdad, Basrah, and a fictional archaeological site with confident local colour.

 

1950. A high-profile meeting between Russian and American heads of state is to take place in Baghdad, Iraq, but international tensions are threatening to sabotage its effectiveness before it has even started. Key to its success is a message from a secret agent, but an unknown enemy is doing everything to stop either from reaching the necessary authorities.

Bored shorthand typist Victoria Jones perks up her dull life through imaginative lies. When her appetite for adventure sends her to Baghdad in search of Edward, a handsome young man she has previously only met on a park bench in London, and into the midst of international intrigue, her talent for spinning a tale suddenly becomes the difference between life and death.

 

Although Agatha Christie’s mysteries have grown in appeal for me over the years after a lukewarm appreciation in my teens, I rarely find the descriptions of scenery in her books other than bland. With its briskly detailed settings, They Came To Baghdad differs as much in this aspect from Christie's usual books as it does in being a thriller or adventure story rather than a typical whodunnit. Christie's Iraq in 1950 is not a romanticised Western vision of a mystical East: Baghdad, for example, at first lets the excited Victoria down with its ill-paved streets, dust storms, cacophony of street noise, and shop windows filled with international goods. I rather suspect Christie is recounting her own first impressions, and that these, like Victoria’s, gradually evolved into unexpected fascination with increased understanding of the city’s personality.

The story develops through multiple points of view, with the audacious Victoria Jones emerging as the central character whose adventures and misadventures lead to the unveiling of the central mystery. Although Victoria does have a code of honour in that she does not wish to be employed in any dishonest work, she is far from the stereotypical heroine whose virtues dictate she must starve rather than steal. The reader is introduced to her thus: “The superior fascination of fiction to fact was always irresistible to Victoria. She lied with fluency, ease, and artistic fervour.” I was curious to see how the author planned to redeem her – if redeemed she would be – but from early on it becomes clear that Victoria really is rather agreeable, being generally good-natured (excepting a few attacks of jealousy where her attraction to Edward is involved) and possessing both common sense and courage.

Since They Came To Baghdad also charts Victoria’s evolution from silly office prankster to an amateur spy whom danger and death teach sobering lessons, it is fitting that the romantic subplot takes an unconventional path. Everything ties neatly with the main flow of the story, and indeed enhances it.

Although some serious themes are broached, and the plot contrasts the rights of everyday people leading everyday lives with the goals of elitist idealists, They Came To Baghdad unapologetically espouses escapism over complexity and depth. Unlike, say, Helen MacInnes’s Cold War spy novels, They Came To Baghdad shows no interest in promoting or condemning either Communism or Capitalism, which helps the story bounce along with an air of carefree timelessness.

Agatha Christie fits a convoluted plot into a book of a mere 254 pages, and consequently the pacing is rapid if not always smooth. Due to the changing viewpoints it took me a few chapters to get properly settled into the story, but once I allowed its lightness and good spirit to carry me along I found the whole very readable. Tolerant suspension of disbelief regarding certain plot points is required, but then that seems generally the case with adventure stories, of which They Came To Baghdad is an amusing example.

 

Excerpt

(Fontana paperback, 1990, page 111-2):

"It was at this moment that without any warning her bedroom door swung open, a man slipped in, turned the key in the lock behind him and said to her urgently:

'For God's sake hide me somewhere - quickly...'

Victoria's reactions were never slow. In a twinkling of an eye she had noted the laboured breathing, the fading voice, the way the man held an old red knitted scarf bunched on his breast with a desperate clutching hand. And she rose immediately in response to the adventure.

The room did not lend itself to many hiding-places. There was the wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a table and the rather pretentious dressing-table. The bed was a large one - almost a double bed and memories of hide-and-seek made Victoria's recation prompt.

'Quick,' she said. She swept off pillows, and raised sheet and blanket. The man lay across the top of the bed. Victoria pulled sheet and blanket over him, dumped the pillows on top and sat down herself on the side of the bed.

Almost immediately there came a low insistent knocking on the door.

Victoria called out, 'Who is it?' in a faint, alarmed voice.

'Please,' said a man's voice outside. 'Open, please. It is the police.'"

Ireland: Surrender To An Irish Warrior by Michelle Willingham

Irish-set romances are a comparative rarity, and since I continue to search for a convincing mediaeval romance, I choked down my annoyance with yet another objectifying romance cover (and awful Harlequin title) and gave Surrender To An Irish Warrior by new-to-me author Michelle Willingham a chance. By now Willingham has set several stories in twelfth-century Ireland, so I was hopeful that in this latest work her research would have attained a level that spares the reader the most common novice anachronisms.

 

1180. A Viking raid against the Ó Reilly clan’s home has left their village in ruins and Treharn MacEgan’s betrothed dead. On his way there to find out what happened and hunt down the perpetrators, Treharn is sidetracked by a desperately ill woman who is hiding from the world in an isolated forest shelter.

A victim of the raiders, Morren Ó Reilly’s resulting pregnancy ends in a miscarriage that might have claimed her life, too, if not for Treharn’s ministrations. Only anxiety for the fate of her one remaining family member, a young sister, who has disappeared while out seeking for help for Morren, persuades her to face people again. But even if her sister is found, and the dead are avenged in blood, neither Morren nor Treharn have faith that they will ever be able to rebuild their shattered lives. And then, just as their mutual support evolves into a fragile hint of something deeper, a devastating revelation forces them to once again re-evaluate what it means to belong.

 

The good news is that Surrender To An Irish Warrior is not a dress-up mediaeval. The better news is that the characters and their interactions are complex, realistic, and appealingly mature, creating a solid, compelling romance even when the clever but unevenly balanced plot peters out into an anti-climactic finale. I hope Michelle Willingham switches to writing single titles one day because I would like to see what she would do with a bigger storyline and a page count that accommodates a more ambitious historical background. If she works on her historical details for a more sharply defined period authenticity, who knows where her career path could lead in the future.

For now, however, Surrender To An Irish Warrior is very much a historical romance as opposed to a romantic historical. As in any romance, the love story is the core and focus of the book, and the category length adds to pushing history to the background both in terms of quantity and depth. What separates the history in Surrender To An Irish Warrior from commonplace historicals is that whatever period flavor is included has not been converted into a theatre stage with modern actors performing in front of historically-themed set paintings. Willingham’s characters form part of a mediaeval landscape, which, while dodgy in some of the specifics, is sincerely conceived, with research efforts integrated in a smooth, unforced way.

By 1180, Normans had taken over as the chief invaders of Ireland, but Willingham chooses to take as her subject the uneasy friendships that centuries of interactions had developed beween Irish tribes and Viking settlers. Placing Morren’s home - a cashel, or ringfort - and a neighbouring Viking longphort in southwestern Ireland, some miles upriver from modern-day Bantry (Surrender To An Irish Warrior, page 53), and the MacEgan's fictional tribal kingdom somewhere in the vicinity of Trim, she shows the effect intermarriage and trade has had on building relationships where formerly only enmity and rivalry existed. One of the key aspects that made Surrender To An Irish Warrior very sympathetic was that both principal and supporting characters reason through problems together and listen to each other, showing how tolerance and understanding can grow wherever ordinary decency and goodwill are allowed to exist.

Refreshingly, scenes which another author might seize on as the perfect excuse for launching the Big Misunderstanding are quietly turned into opportunities for characters to confront their feelings in an open, honest manner. This is particularly the case with Morren, whose pain, vulnerability, and debilitating burden of shame never blind her to the importance of being truthful or admitting her own mistakes. For example, she realises that in trying to keep Jilleen (her sister) safe from danger, she has inadvertently fostered a deep-seated fear in the girl even of their own clanspeople; as a result, she takes steps to correct this despite the hardship it means for herself.

With the imagination of a bard and the hardness of a warrior, the character of Trahern combines thoughtfulness and combativeness. While he shows delicacy in supporting Morren through her plight and is very understanding of her fears about physical closeness, his drive to exact vengeance plays a part in all his actions. As he reminds Morren, he is no saint. While the actual timeline from the couple’s first meeting (early autumn) to their first sexual encounter (shortly before the end of October/Samhain) felt too short to me for true believability, on the actual page the friendship and love between Treharn and Morren develops at a reasonable pace. The absence of mental lusting in the earlier parts of the book (thank you, author!) was as appropriate to their situations as it is unusual in romances.

If there was one thing that disturbed me about the romance between Morren and Trahern, though, it was the relationship of protector and protected. As a rape victim, Morren’s trust in people has been severely damaged and the matter of personal safety is a constant source of anxiety. As someone who has lost the woman he loved to violence, Trahern is ever vigilant about Morren’s wellbeing. Thus, he protects her and she comforts him. Eventually, the constant emphasis on this dynamic seemed to imply it constitutes normal and sufficient reason for a sound love match. I have a problem with that view.

Wounded spirits in all honour, but Morren’s internal reflections about how Trahern is protecting her and making her feel her safe go beyond a matter of needing reassurance. They are relentless, unquestioned, and persist throughout the book. Every time she looks at, thinks about, or interacts with Trahern, she seems to dwell almost exclusively on being kept safe by him. What other qualities she loves or admires about him besides his protective abilities (and storytelling skills) are never really explicitly stated - if they are stated at all. Even Trahern’s storytelling is described as having a protective effect, “weaving a spell around her grief”. When Morren looks at him, she gratefully sees someone who is willing to“lift the world on his shoulders for her.” Throughout the story, Treharn’s attitude encourages her passivity: “Last night, when she’d taken refuge in his arms, he’d wanted to shield her from the world” (page 215). I wish Morren could have been shown to apply (to her own situation) the lesson she learnt from Jilleen's reactions.

In fairness, it is only in this one aspect that I thought Morren’s personality limp. She does of her own accord resolve to face her demons, and repeatedly insists on taking part in seeking out and challenging the guilty. In the final, physical confrontation, she acquits herself capably.

While Willingham’s prose is serviceable it does not avoid some convenient clichés, and this inattention slips the author up, I think, in two cases. Firstly, it is unsettling, in a love story which attempts to deal sensitively with the issue of rape and its destructive consequences, to find the language of conquest and domination that is often so indiscriminately used in romance writing to convey male passion. Deep into the story, although Morren has actively invited Trahern’s kiss, the encounter is described in terms of an exercise of power: “Hungry and heated, he captured her mouth, coaxing her to surrender.” Secondly, Trahern is a bard whose mastery at holding his audience spellbound is commented on several times. It is a little unfortunate that the actual examples given of this supposed skill are noteworthy for their lifelessness.

Apparently, Surrender To An Irish Warrior is the concluding installment in a series about the MacEgans. There is absolutely no need to read the previous books in order to understand what is going on in the last. However, characters from the other books do appear in this one. Although there are acceptable plot reasons to justify their presence, the story does - in common with the typical series family reunion - tread water for a while as the marital bliss of the other couples is being demonstrated. Another instance where the narrative tension slackened came toward the end, when the realism that had set the tone for the story up till then was changed in favor of fairytale rosiness. In my case, it subdued the emotional impact of the ending.

All in all, while Surrender To An Irish Warrior did not bring my search for a satisfying mediaeval historical romance to a conclusion, neither did those of more famous names (Madeline Hunter, Barbara Samuels); moreover, I enjoyed myself too much to be disappointed. Michelle Willingham gave me compelling characters and a poignant love story, and within the confines of a short page count worked hard to integrate these with a realistic setting. If she chooses to continue writing short historicals, I suspect she has every chance of becoming very successful at it. But if she is interested in developing her talents in a slightly different direction, there’s this author named Elizabeth Chadwick whose early career shows how one can learn to combine romance and mediaeval history without sacrificing either...

Teaser Tuesday: They Came To Baghdad by Agatha Christie

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

 

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
•  Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• Be careful not to include spoilers! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away. You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

 

My teaser

(Fontana paperback, 1990, page 16):

 

“The superior fascination of fiction to fact was always irresistible to Victoria. She lied with fluency, ease, and artistic fervour.”

 

They Came To Baghdad (originally published in 1951) is an Agatha Christie mystery about which I can recall absolutely nothing, so I am enjoying it as if for the first time. The Wikipedia entry about the novel labels it an adventure story with romantic elements rather than a conventional whodunnit, and compares it to The Man In The Brown Suit. That and its Iraqi locale, which Christie knew from excavation trips with her archaeologist husband, is what made me pick it up as a break from a long run of romances and historical fiction.

As the teaser implies, there is an air of insouciance and risk-taking about the heroine, Victoria Jones. Recently fired from her job as a typist for entertaining her office mates with an ill-timed parody of her employer's wife, she proceeds to move heaven and earth in her determination to follow a charmingly mysterious young man to Baghdad. No doubt plenty of international trouble awaits!

I hope to post my thoughts about They Came To Baghdad on Friday. In the meantime, please feel free to comment about your own Tuesday teaser and share a link to it!

Portugal: Marrying The Royal Marine by Carla Kelly

Carla Kelly’s Marrying The Royal Marine presented a mess of problems for me, and I struggled quite ridiculously to finish it. Had this Regency historical romance been the first book I read by the author I suspect it may have remained the last.

 

1812. The illegitimate daughter of a national war hero, eighteen-year old Polly Brandon has felt unwanted all her life. Her newfound sisters are loving but married and have their own lives. Hoping to be of service in the army hospital in Oporto where her brother-in-law is chief surgeon, she is billeted aboard a navy frigate bound for war-torn Portugal. When she falls violently seasick the task of caring for her is assumed by the only other passenger - a man.

Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Philippe d’Anvers of the Royal Marines is voyaging out to the troops in the Peninsular war on an information-gathering mission. As he looks after Polly he begins to see beyond her spectacles, and she beyond his handsome looks, and they become friends. But once in Portugal their responsibilities and uncertainties about the other person’s affections conspire to separate them. Until they meet by chance during a dangerous trip upriver to retrieve patients - and their capture by the enemy forces the pair to invent a marriage to protect each other.

 

The setup of Marrying The Royal Marine assumes familiarity with the two previous romances in the trilogy. I have read the first, Marrying The Captain, but not the second, The Surgeon’s Lady, which meant not only that some of the references in Marrying The Royal Marine puzzled me, but also, since scant clues are provided, that I never figured out exactly how or when Polly had been reunited with her sisters. As it turned out, this missing background was the least of my issues.

For a love story to hold credibility for me when either of the parties is very young and the age difference is significant, I have to believe that the younger person possesses a good dose of independence and intelligence, and that this is what draws the older person to him/her. Jane Eyre is a classic example: the heroine’s trials and tribulations have matured her beyond her years and her passionate nature is combined with a strong, independent, gifted spirit. Joanna in Here Be Dragons by Sharon Penman is allowed to mature before the marriage is consummated, and the road to that point (and beyond it) is realistically thorny.

Marrying The Royal Marine is not quite a May-December romance, but at the age of 37, Hugh is nineteen years older than eighteen-year old Polly. By the end of their sea voyage he has decided that he wants her to “mother his children” (page 88). Now, during much of this trip Polly has been ill and helpless. Hugh has had to both wash her and help her dress. Once she recovers sufficiently to go up on deck, she is still too weak to do much beyond lounging in a canvas chair. He comforts her when she fears the ship will sink in bad weather and teaches her how to walk and retain her balance aboard a rolling ship. In all this, he is kind and does his best to put her at ease. He could have done no better had he been a doctor or a relative.

He is not, however, a doctor or a relative. Yet even after Polly has recovered, he presumes to cup her cheek, chuck her chin, button the back of her dress, push up the spectacles on her nose. Nobody, including Polly, seems to see anything improper in this intimacy.

In an era when the touch of an ungloved hand breached the boundaries of propriety unless the persons involved shared long familiarity, Hugh and Polly's forced interactions behind closed doors should put them in an awkward position. To offer succour to a person in need is expected; for Hugh to unbidden continue touching a woman to whom he is not engaged, is asking for her reputation to be ruined. Fortunately for the two, it never occurs to the crew on board the frigate to so much as send a wondering glance in their direction. Every last British soldier is nobly compassionate and innocent of a single ungentlemanly thought. Or do they consider Polly a child?

If Polly had been shown to be Hugh’s equal in some way during the voyage, or even if she had directly solicited his touch, the historical unlikelihood of their obliviousness to social etiquette would have bothered me less; Regencylandia is amply peopled by characters who behave according to modern standards. But throughout most of the book Polly is shown as someone in dire need of protection, weak and defenseless. With the steep age gap added, and little explanation of exactly how and why Hugh’s care-giving has developed into a wish to father her children – “Maybe it was the wistful way Polly Brandon had spoken of snapdragons” (p. 66) – the imbalance in their relationship leaned toward the unhealthy for me from the beginning.

It does not help that Polly is the romance version of a Disney heroine. From her first moments in Oporto (now Porto), children and distrustful young rape victims (casualties of French war atrocities) flock to her like the animals in the forest to Snow White. When she is enlisted for solitary night duty in the the hospital wing where the rape victims reside, she is immediately able to soothe their nightmares and calm them back to sleep with “her tender sympathy” (page 109) without any prior instruction or experience. Moreover, the matter of Polly’s illegitimacy seems to serve no plot purpose other than to make her doubt a man like Hugh would want her as wife. Hugh dismisses any thought of her birth being an issue from his head the moment it occurs to him.

As for Hugh, his full name was a source of a distraction for me. When I learned that the hero of Marrying The Royal Marine is called Hugh Philippe Junot, I was intrigued yet not very pleasantly amused. Intrigued, because a British officer with a French name in a story that plays out in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars raises the possibility of interesting internal conflicts; perhaps torn loyalties of some sort? Indeed, there is a justifiable plot reason for naming him thus, although it is a decidedly unexciting one. I was also unpleasantly amused. Deliberately or not, “Philippe Junot” evokes associations to the relationship between the young Princess Caroline of Monaco and a seventeen years older Frenchman by the name of, yes, Philippe Junot. (This much-gossiped-about marriage lasted two years.)

Speaking of the Napoleonic Wars. The brutish conduct of French troops during the Peninsular War has been documented, and Kelly exploits this for Marrying The Royal Marine. In her description of the violence of war and its consequences not only for the fighting troops but the women and children of occupied areas, she enters territory few currently writing historical romance writers have dared explore. It brings blood-soaked realism and plenty of emotional drama to the story, and Marrying The Royal Marine is, I think, the stronger for it.

Yet there is a glaring discrepancy in the general portrayal of the French versus the British (the Portuguese play only a supporting role in the story) that diminished Kelly’s accomplishment for me. For more than half the novel the word “French” rarely appears without appendages such as "murderous" or "raping"; and once French characters enter the story, they live down to history with gusto. By contrast, the British are depicted as honourable, brave, and self-sacrificing to the last man. There is not a hint anywhere, as the war is discussed, that would indicate rueful awareness that British soldiers might ever, somewhere, have committed similar offenses. In an early nineteenth-century teenage girl such as Polly this naivety is understandable, but in a veteran officer from an expanding colonial power it smacks of double standards or obtuseness, especially after he has regaled Polly with stories of his campaigns in India. By the time glimpses of redemption began to be seen in one of the French characters I had lost so much patience with the overall black and white characterisations that I no longer cared much.

Incidentally, up until page 167, the point at which I started skimming, nobody had bothered ruminating on the fact that neither the British nor the French do, in fact, belong in Portugal. (The Portuguese, on their part, were in the same period colonising Brazil.) Historically, the Portuguese were forced to remind the British of this when, after peace had been concluded and the French had withdrawn from the country, the British decided to remain as administrators. The Portuguese kicked them out eight years after the events described in Marrying The Royal Marine – a rebellion which started in Oporto.

Finally, when an author decides to pinpoint a specific location for his or her story, it helps me enormously as a reader to immerse myself in the setting if I receive some descriptions of scenery. Unfortunately, all I got were building names and Portuguese words paired with trite declarations like “the view of Oporto took his breath away” and “I have never seen anything so magnificent” and “the canyon was breathtaking in its wild beauty”. The army hospital of Oporto is situated in a convent, and one nun in particular becomes a prominent supporting character, but since not even the Order was specified, I was unable to visualize her person clearly (her face, yes). Social customs of the Portuguese are not entered into other than in connection with the attitude toward rape victims. For any idea of what Oporto may have looked like, other than the presence of the River Douro, I had to look up photographs. One of the rare descriptions is of an old chapel (page 96), which contains an error that conflates several centuries of mediaeval history : “[...] incense-darkened ceiling, low and decidedly pre-gothic. What did they pray about then? Polly asked herself. The Black Death?”

After this litany of complaints it should be obvious to anyone who has not yet expired from apoplectic outrage (the author has acquired an iconic status among many romance readers) that I and Marrying The Royal Marine failed to connect on any level. Although One Good Turn is one of my favourite Regencies, and Carla Kelly’s compassionate characters and touching tales of redemption have resonated deeply with me in the past, I have come to see that my tastes align only randomly with her writing. I regret that this was not one of those times.

Mali: Footprints In The Sand by Sarah Challis

A delightful combination of chick-lit-style road adventure and fictionalised travelogue, Footprints In The Sand by Sarah Challis is the next best thing if you are unable to throw on your backpack and head for Africa this instant.

Feeling vague about Mali? If the mention of Tuaregs, a music festival in the desert, Dogon masks, or the world’s largest earthen building (in the UNESCO world heritage site of Djenné) don’t ring a bell, remember the villainous Edgar of Aristocats who was shipped off to Timbuktu? Much too good a fate for him, if you ask me. Hopefully, as it did for one of the protagonists of Footprints In The Sand, Mali inspired a life-changing epiphany.

 

When cantankerous, Harrods-loving Great-Aunt Mary dies, her will tasks two twenty-something relatives, cousins Emily and Clemmie Kingsley, with a mission that stuns the Dorset farming family: scatter her ashes in the Malian portion of the Sahara desert.

Clemmie is enchanted by the prospect of the adventure of a lifetime, but Emily balks. Miserable in the wake of her breakup from an unfaithful boyfriend, the last thing she wants is to chase another illusion. Nobody has ever heard of the location Great-Aunt Mary’s will mentions, nor suspected she had any connection to Africa: what if the eccentric idea was an attack of senility? Beryl Timmis, Mary’s companion, is of no help in puzzling out the mystery; silently she hopes nothing will come of the affair. But Clemmie overcomes every objection, and as her best friend, Emily reluctantly gives in. Now the only question that remains is how they will hunt down a place that does not exist on any map – and in the process of unravelling Mary’s secret, try to figure out the unspoken responsibilities of friendship.

 

As I devoured Footprints In The Sand, mental images from a completey unrelated film kept popping up in my head. The snappy, humorous exchanges between optimistic idealist Clemmie and practical skeptic Emily reminded me of girlfriends Mary McCormack and Minnie Driver in the British crime-comedy High Heels And Low Lifes. (Driver and McCormack have great chemistry, the quirky-never-a-dull-moment plot and dialogue crackle with energy and fun, and the ending is sassily upbeat. Just thinking about that film makes me grin.) The dynamic between the women, the British origin of both film and book, the pursuit of a madcap undertaking, and the positive focus on female friendship are probably the only similarities between book and film. Except that in my head, Emily and Clemmie now look and talk like Driver and McCormack (and yes, I realise the latter is American).

Footprints In The Sand starts out rather conventionally, but the chatty warmth and immediacy of the narrative style kept me entertained until the story gathered steam with the revelation of Great-Aunt Mary’s request. Despite the mystery at its heart, the plot is on the thin side, yet absorbing and not entirely predictable. What propelled me to turn the pages with unflagging curiosity were the quixotic nature of the mission, the character revelations, the emotional secrets, and the fascination of discovering Mali. Sarah Challis’s flair for painterly metaphors and illuminating detail are a joy and proved a saving grace when the cousins’ road trip from Bamako (Mali’s capital) temporarily strayed into the territory of enthusiastic travelogue.

The front cover of my edition of Footprints In The Sand has the following line: What happens when you finish someone else’s journey? The inner journeys of the characters parallel the cousins’ travel expedition. At the same time, this is not a new age tale replete with mystical life lessons. Emily and Clemmie’s personalities and their attitude to the country they are travelling through infuse the tone with breezy humour and self-irony, ensuring that moments of darker emotion never bog the story down in self-important melodrama. Any messages are left for the reader to infer.

The story is alternately narrated by Emily and Clemmie, with brief, at first seemingly random, but actually crucial insertions by Beryl Timmis. The two younger women’s casually confident voices are clearly distinct from the anxious strain of Beryl’s, whose account gradually develops into an unsettling counterpoint to the cousins’ adventure. In segments where plot development takes a back seat, their different outlooks provide a tension that kept me fully absorbed in the story.

Perceived by others as a timid spinster frightened of her own shadow, Beryl Timmis is treated with absent-minded indulgence. With Mary’s death and shock of a request, the past comes back to haunt Beryl. As Clemmie and Sarah travel to Africa, Beryl, now installed in a first-class retirement home thanks to Mary’s generosity, travels back in memory to the secrecy-laden turning point in her and Mary’s lives. Beryl’s internal monologue reveals a side of which others seem oblivious: self-pity centred around a selfish, critical kernel that retains little sweetness and only feigned dottiness. Gradually, through memories she has unsuccessfully tried to repress, an increasingly disturbing picture emerges. While Clemmie and Emily literally journey through sunshine, Beryl’s fears in winter-gloomy England lurk like chill shadows at the edges of the main tale.

Clemmie is Beryl’s opposite. Bubbling with enthusiasm, she sees the best in every person and finds the silver lining in any situation. In England, she has been drifting through life without clear focus, not unhappy, but dreaming of something special that will show her what life should be about. Her acceptance of the here and now makes her more easily contented than Emily, and her open nature seems to invite miracles. Situations Emily suffers through with boredom or worry are just as likely to be sources of meditative reflection and serenity for Clemmie.

Emily views her cousin’s impetuousness with a mix of grumpy exasperation and sisterly fondness. An elementary school teacher who is struggling to come to terms with her breakup with a longtime boyfriend, she sees the trip not as an adventure but a series of challenges, and is repeatedly on the brink of resigning herself to the potential failure of their mission. The Sahara desert tests her to the extreme, and the question becomes whether history will repeat itself.

A strong theme evolves through the contrasting and complementing friendships of Mary and Beryl versus Emily and Clemmie: even well-meaning meddling with an individual’s power to choose her/his own way can kill a spirit and give rise to a lifetime of regrets.

Mali transforms the cousins’ perception of the world and of themselves, and their meeting with locals who become guides and friends turn their unconventional task into something resembling a pilgrimage. While Challis’s admiration for the country (which she has personally visited) is evident and she pokes gentle fun at Western tourists, she deftly avoids the cliché of painting the place as an African Shangri-La. Footprints In The Sand is not interested in offering an analysis of cultural otherness (at least not directly; it is discoveries of sameness that most often fascinate the two women). Even so, while the story may not dive very deeply beneath the surface glamour of exotic travel – rough-and-ready though the actual mode of travel may be – Emily and Clemmie do experience an uncomfortable awareness of the exploitative side of tourism in a poor country. “I did not enjoy being a sightseer and neither did Emily. With nothing to offer, nothing to give, we were just gawpers from another world.” (Page 269.)

My enjoyment of Footprints In The Sand was such that few flaws bothered me. As different as Beryl’s voice is from those of Clemmie and Emily, this difference was liable to evaporate when it came to certain instances of descriptive imagery. Instead of Beryl’s fussy negativity, Clemmie’s cheerful optimism, or Emily’s skepticism, I would suddenly hear the author being unable to resist inserting a particularly labored-over passage whether or not it fit the character’s thought pattern or voice. Each time it happened I was pulled out of the character’s head for a moment.

One thing remained unclear to me at the conclusion of the story. I can only try to guess at why Mary selected Clemmie and Emily rather than someone else from the large Kingsley clan. Perhaps the cousins’ friendship inspired Mary to try to write a new ending for the past? Perhaps she wanted to open up the truth in the hope that someone might finally understand her, someone who might gain something equally life-changing from it? I don’t know, but neither does it matter much to me since it detracts nothing essential from the story.

Finally, I have seen some otherwise satisfied readers grumble about the ending being “sappy” or “silly”. Those less allergic to romantic story elements should be aware that the romance that occurs is an end result – the expression of a spiritual (as distinct from religious) homecoming – not a subplot.

Footprints In The Sand was recommended by Mog, and I am so glad I listened! Reading it proved an undiluted pleasure and the most charming armchair trip I took all summer.

 

Excerpt

(Headline Review, paperback, 2007, page 86-88):

“Although I had agreed to go to Mali with her, there was still one conversation I felt we had to have.

‘Okay, Clem,’ I said, taking a deep breath, ‘let’s get this clear from the start. If we get out there and find that we can’t make contact with this man of Great-Aunt Mary’s, this Salika person, then that is it. We find a suitable place to scatter the old girl and we call it a day. I’m not going wandering off on our own in the Sahara. You’ve got to know what you are doing in an environment like that and you’ve got to be with people you can trust. I looked up Mali on the Foreign Office travel advice page this afternoon. Look at this!’ I handed her a printed sheet and waited while she skimmed through it.

‘I know all this,’ she said airily, handing it back. ‘Will told me. But they always exaggerate, don’t they? They try and put you off going anywhere but the New Forest or a coach tour of the Lake District.’

I picked up the sheet and read out, ‘Because of increased risk of banditry and kidnap we advise against travel to the north of Timbuktu. Bandits and smugglers across the borders of Mali, Mauritania, and Algeria constitute a real risk to travellers, especially after dark.’

Clemmie had picked up a hand mirror and was studying an imaginary spot on her face, refusing to meet my eye. Instead she said, ‘Emily! Pick up that free local paper on the table. What’s that on the front page? Muggings? A rape? In one week, and in this neighbourhood alone. London is a million times more dangerous than Mali, where crime levels are actually really low. It says so if you read on a bit. Anyway,’ she said, putting down the mirror and looking at me brightly, ‘wouldn’t it be blissful to be kidnapped by those camel men? It would beat teaching, wouldn’t it?’

I shook my head. Sometimes Clemmie’s remarks are too silly to merit an answer. On the other hand, she was probably expressing her real opinion. It would be typical of her to think that it would be exciting to be kidnapped.

‘It would be a big mistake on their part,’ I said. ‘Who do you think would pay the ransom? I can’t see the Kingsleys forking out to get us back.’

‘Isn’t it said,’ said Clemmie, ‘to be so superfluous?’”

 

A book of related interest: As far as I have been able to find out, Clive Cussler’s Sahara was published in 1992, the year Mali was holding its first democratic presidential election. Thus its description of a fictional dictatorship instantly dated the novel, as do the descriptions of violent rule and rampant corruption. USAid now considers Mali one of the most stable countries in Africa. With that it mind, Sahara (and its film adaptation) becomes a book best read as a fantasy adventure rather than a tale grounded in reality.

Edited to add (13 June 2011): An intriguing romantic novel also set in the Sahara, The Salt Road by Jane Johnson takes a much closer look at Tuaregs. I have posted about it here.