Tag: Morocco

The Black Crescent by Jane Johnson

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Jane Johnson is a British author who has set several of her novels in Morocco, her husband’s country, with each book exploring a different period in Morocco’s history. The Black Crescent is set in the 1950s, during the time of the French protectorate, when support for Moroccan independence was building momentum.

Our narrator, Hamou Badi, grows up in the remote mountain village of Tiziane, a place where the people still cling to ancient traditions and superstitions. Due to the lines on his hands, Hamou himself is said to be a ‘zouhry’, a legendary figure blessed by a djinn and capable of locating treasure and detecting sources of water. However, it is not treasure that eleven-year-old Hamou finds one day in 1939, but the body of a woman, hidden amongst the palm trees by a dried up riverbed. The lack of interest shown by the French authorities in trying to solve this murder leads to Hamou’s decision to become a police officer and ensure that future victims of crime are given the justice they deserve.

Several years later, in 1955, we rejoin Hamou in Casablanca, where he is now working for the Sûreté, the police force of the French colonialists who are still ruling the country. Hamou takes his job seriously, trying to maintain law and order on the streets of Casablanca, but he quickly discovers that many of his fellow Moroccans see him as a traitor and someone not to be trusted. As the independence movement continues to gather force, Hamou finds himself caught between the two sides and must decide which is most important to him – loyalty to his country or to the employer who pays his wages.

The Black Crescent is a fascinating novel, particularly as I previously had such limited knowledge of French-ruled Morocco. I knew nothing about the work of the Istiqlal (independence) Party or the tensions and unrest following France’s exile of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953. Hamou is the perfect choice of narrator, with one foot in both worlds, showing us that there are good and bad people on both sides. Johnson has clearly researched this period thoroughly (she provides a list of her sources in her author’s note) and writes with an understanding and sympathy for the aims of the Moroccans in attempting to overthrow their French occupiers, but without condoning the violence used by some groups such as the ‘Black Crescent’ of the title.

Hamou is portrayed as an honourable, kind-hearted man trying to navigate his way through a difficult situation and I found him easy to like. He also has a love interest – a young woman he meets in Casablanca – but it only plays a small part in the book and I was just as captivated by the relationship he forms with Madani, the little black cat he rescues and adopts. The book did feel very slow-paced and took much longer to read than I’d expected based on the length, but it held my interest throughout and I learned a lot from it. I wish I’d known there was a glossary at the end of the book, but I was able to understand most of the Moroccan terms from the context anyway, so that wasn’t too much of a problem!

I think The Sultan’s Wife, set in 17th century Morocco, is still my favourite Jane Johnson book so far, but there are three of her earlier novels I haven’t read yet, so that could change!

Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 49/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Night Train to Marrakech by Dinah Jefferies

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Night Train to Marrakech is the third and final book in Dinah Jefferies’ Daughters of War trilogy, but if you haven’t read the previous two books that shouldn’t be a problem as I think this one would also work well as a standalone. While Daughters of War and The Hidden Palace followed the stories of the three Baudin sisters, Hélène, Élise and Florence, during World War II, this third novel moves forward to the 1960s to focus on Élise’s daughter, Vicky.

In July 1966, Vicky Baudin arrives in Morocco to visit her grandmother for the first time. Having lost her father during the war, Vicky has only recently discovered that his mother, Clemence, is still alive and living in the mountains outside Marrakech. Vicky has just received a diploma in fashion design from a London art college, so this seems like a good time to travel abroad before beginning a postgraduate course in Paris. As her train arrives at Marrakech station, Vicky is looking forward to getting to know Clemence – and is determined to find a way to meet her hero, the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, who also lives in Marrakech.

In her mountain home, the Kasbah du Paradis, Clemence is awaiting her long-lost granddaughter’s arrival with mixed emotions. Vicky will want to know why she played no part in her son’s life and Clemence doesn’t feel ready to explain. However, she’s forced to confront the memories she’s tried so hard to forget when a man from her past reappears, threatening to reveal her secrets. Meanwhile, Vicky and her cousin Bea also stumble into trouble when they become witnesses to a crime.

Night Train to Marrakech has a much stronger thriller element than the previous two books, which I found quite surprising. The novel is set against a backdrop of rising political tensions – a few months before the novel begins, the Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka is abducted in Paris (a real life incident) – and although this doesn’t form a large part of the plot, it does give a sense of the danger for two young women who unintentionally become mixed up in a situation they don’t fully understand. The descriptions of Morocco itself – the scenery, the buildings, the food, the sounds and smells – are also beautifully done.

The three sisters from the first two books (Vicky’s mother, Élise, and her two aunts, Hélène and Florence) do eventually make an appearance in this one, but I was disappointed that we don’t see very much of them. This is very much Vicky’s story and Clemence’s, and although having two completely new characters to get to know so late in the trilogy unsettled me slightly, I did warm to them later in the book. I found Clemence in particular an intriguing character as she seems so cold and secretive at first but as more and more of her story unfolds, the reason for this becomes clear and by the end of the book I had gained a lot of respect and sympathy for her.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Daughters of War and The Hidden Palace – as the third in a trilogy I would have preferred it to be more closely linked with the first two books rather than moving on to the next generation – but the gripping plot and evocative setting still made it worthwhile. As for whether or not Vicky achieves her dream of meeting Yves Saint Laurent, you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 40/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie

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August’s theme for the Read Christie 2022 challenge is ‘a story set in a hot climate’, so the recommended title, Destination Unknown, which is set in North Africa, was the perfect choice. I was a bit apprehensive about reading this one because it doesn’t seem to get very good reviews and it’s certainly not one of Christie’s better known novels (in fact it’s one of only four of her books never to have been adapted for TV or film), but I found it entertaining enough.

We first meet our heroine, Hilary Craven, in a Casablanca hotel room, preparing to commit suicide. Her daughter has died, her marriage has broken down and she feels she has nothing to live for. Before she can go through with her plans, however, she is interrupted by Jessop, a British secret agent. Jessop has noticed a resemblance between Hilary and another woman, Olive Betterton, who has been fatally injured in a plane crash, and he has an interesting suggestion to make…

It is believed that Olive was on her way to Morocco to join her husband, Thomas Betterton, a renowned nuclear physicist who recently went missing in Paris. Betterton is one of several scientists from around the world who have all disappeared without trace. Jessop wants Hilary Craven to impersonate the dying woman in the hope that she will be able to locate Betterton and the other missing scientists. With nothing to lose, Hilary agrees.

As you can probably tell from my synopsis of the plot, this is not a murder mystery like most of Christie’s other books and it does not feature any of her famous characters such as Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence. It’s much more of a thriller, with elements of spy/espionage fiction. I really enjoyed the first half of the novel – although the plot is undoubtedly a bit far-fetched and unlikely, I do like a good impersonation story and was interested to see how Hilary would cope with her task and where following Betterton’s trail would lead her to. I also loved the descriptions of Morocco and wished we could have spent more time in Casablanca and Fez before Hilary’s adventures took her off into the High Atlas mountains:

All about her were the walls of old Fez. Narrow winding streets, high walls, and occasionally, through a doorway, a glimpse of an interior or a courtyard, and moving all around her were laden donkeys, men with their burdens, boys, women veiled and unveiled, the whole busy secret life of this Moorish city. Wandering through the narrow streets she forgot everything else, her mission, the past tragedy of herself, even her life.

As is typical of Christie, the plot takes lots of twists and turns, there are some surprises and we are never sure which of the many characters Hilary meets can and cannot be trusted. However, later in the book, when we discover what has happened to the missing scientists, it all becomes quite bizarre and I felt that the motive behind the disappearances was quite weak and implausible. Remembering that the book was published in 1954, though, the world war which ended less than ten years earlier must have been on Christie’s mind, as well as post-war politics and the Cold War; there are references to creating a ‘new world order’ and a mysterious figure whose charisma and power of oration makes Hilary think of Hitler.

Hilary herself is less engaging than the heroines of some of Christie’s other thrillers, such as Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit and Victoria Jones in They Came to Baghdad, and the book overall is not as much fun as those two. I find the thrillers a nice change from the mysteries, though, and I did enjoy this one despite finding the first half much stronger than the second. I’m not sure whether I’ll take part in Read Christie in September – the theme is ‘a story with a female adventurer’ and the group read is They Came to Baghdad which, as I’ve just mentioned, I’ve already read (and loved, but don’t want to read again just yet). I might see if there’s an alternative title I could read to fit that theme instead, or maybe I’ll wait and join in again in October.

This is book 13/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani

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I’ve never read anything by Leïla Slimani until now, but her latest book, The Country of Others, sounded appealing to me – and as it’s translated from French, it means I can contribute to this year’s #WITMonth (Women in Translation Month).

Originally published as Le pays des autres and available now in an English translation by Sam Taylor, the novel is set in France and Morocco during the 1940s and 50s. Mathilde is a young woman from the Alsace region of France who, in the final years of World War II, falls in love with a Moroccan soldier, Amine, who has been fighting for the French. Bored with her life and looking for adventure, Mathilde marries Amine and moves with him to Meknes in Morocco where he has inherited some farmland. Here, as she struggles to settle into her new home, Mathilde begins to think she has made a huge mistake; this is certainly not the romantic, idyllic life she’d imagined herself leading. Loneliness, hostile neighbours, financial difficulties, an unhappy, abusive husband and political upheaval as Morocco tries to gain independence from France are just some of the problems Mathilde has to deal with.

Mathilde finds that the other French people in Meknes look down on her for marrying a Moroccan Muslim, while Amine’s Moroccan friends are suspicious of his white, European, Catholic wife. It’s not an easy situation for Amine either and he becomes torn between admiration for Mathilde and embarrassment at her refusal to behave the way he believes a woman should, which leads to some unpleasant scenes of domestic violence and cruelty. The novel is written from the perspectives of both Mathilde and Amine, as well as several more characters, all of whom are trying to find a place for themselves in this ‘country of others’: these include Aïcha, Mathilde and Amine’s daughter, who is aware that her mixed race makes her different from the other children at school; Selma, Amine’s teenage sister, a young woman who feels trapped in this male-dominated society and is desperate for freedom; and Omar, their brother, a fierce and violent man who has joined the fight for Moroccan independence and wants the French out of his country.

Although I did have a lot of sympathy for the circumstances in which most of the characters found themselves, many of them were such unlikeable people I found myself less moved by their stories than I would have expected. It didn’t help that the book is written in a strangely detached, passionless style, which I suppose is appropriate for the bleak and miserable events that are being described, but didn’t enable me to form any real emotional connection with any of the characters, not even Mathilde or Aïcha. Sometimes I almost felt that I was reading a work of non-fiction rather than a novel – and in fact, I discovered when I was halfway through the book that it’s the first in a planned trilogy drawing on Slimani’s own family history, which probably explains why it felt like a memoir.

Despite not particularly enjoying or even liking this book, I still found it interesting. I wasn’t really prepared for something so relentlessly depressing and completely without hope and I probably won’t continue with the other two books, but I do feel that I learned a lot from this one – about the challenges faced by interracial couples, the place of women in 1940s Moroccan society, and the political situation as the country moved towards independence. This was a worthwhile read, but I don’t think Slimani is an author for me.

Book 36/50 read for the 2021 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

The Tenth Gift by Jane Johnson

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When we think about slavery it’s not usually the capture and sale of white Europeans that comes to mind, but that is the topic at the heart of Jane Johnson’s The Tenth Gift. In August 1625, a church in Mount’s Bay, Cornwall was raided by Barbary pirates who took sixty men, women and children into captivity to be sold at the slave markets of Morocco. In The Tenth Gift, Johnson imagines the story of one of these captives – a young woman called Catherine Anne Tregenna.

When we first meet Catherine, or Cat as she is known, she is working as a lady’s maid at a large manor house in Cornwall. A marriage has been arranged for her with her cousin, Robert Bolitho, but Cat wants more out of life. Her skills with a needle have won her a commission from the Countess of Salisbury and she dreams of joining a guild and becoming a master embroiderer, even if she has to leave Cornwall to do it. However, she is soon to travel further from Cornwall than she could ever have imagined. Abducted from church by Barbary corsairs along with her friends, family and neighbours, Cat finds herself on a ship heading towards North Africa, her fate to be decided by the corsair captain.

But Cat’s is not the only story to be told in this novel. In the present day, we meet Julia Lovat, a woman who has been having an affair with Michael, her best friend’s husband, a seven-year relationship which has just come to an end. As a parting gift, Michael gives her an old book of embroidery patterns, but when Julia opens the book she is confronted by something unusual – a series of diary entries written in the margins by someone called Cat who lived in the seventeenth century. Julia is soon engrossed in reading about Cat’s ordeal, but it is only when she visits Morocco herself that she is able to put together all the pieces of Cat’s story.

I found a lot to enjoy in The Tenth Gift, which isn’t surprising as I’ve previously enjoyed two of Jane Johnson’s other Moroccan novels, The Sultan’s Wife and Court of Lions. She writes so vividly about Morocco, describing all of the sounds, sights and smells with a vibrancy that really brings the setting to life. Her depiction of seventeenth century Cornwall is equally well done and it’s obvious that she knows both places very well. The two storylines – past and present – fit together perfectly and the links between them don’t feel too contrived, although there are some supernatural undertones, particularly towards the end, that I thought seemed unnecessary.

I liked Cat and found her story fascinating but, as happens so often with these dual timeframe novels, I thought the present day one was much weaker. I never really managed to warm to Julia and didn’t have much sympathy for her relationship problems; I did become more invested in her story once she arrived in Morocco, but I think the book would have worked better as a straight historical novel without the modern day sections. Cat’s adventures are so interesting and I appreciated the way Jane Johnson tries to give an explanation for why the corsairs behaved the way they did and explores both the similarities and differences between Christian and Islamic cultures.

If you do read this book and enjoy it, you might also enjoy The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson, which deals with a different pirate raid, this time on Iceland’s Westman Islands in 1627, or The Sea-Hawk by Rafael Sabatini, a wonderfully entertaining novel which also takes us from Cornwall to the Barbary Coast.

Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Sultan’s Wife by Jane Johnson

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The Sultan’s Wife is set in Morocco in the year 1677 and is narrated by two different characters. The first is Nus-Nus, a eunuch slave in the palace of the Sultan Moulay Ismail and the second is Alys Swann, an Englishwoman who has been captured at sea by corsairs and given to the Sultan as a gift. Amidst the dangers and conspiracies of Ismail’s court, Nus-Nus and Alys form a friendship and try to help each other survive.

I haven’t read any of Jane Johnson’s previous novels and chose to read this one purely because the setting sounded so interesting. I’ve never read a novel set in 17th century Morocco and I fell in love with the setting from the very first chapter. Everything was described so vividly, I wasn’t surprised to find that the author lives in Morocco herself and has already written two other books set in the same country. I learned so many fascinating little facts about Moroccan history and culture and about the building of the historic city of Meknes (which was intended to rival Versailles). There are also a few chapters where the action moves to England and the court of Charles II in Restoration-period London. It was interesting to be shown the English court through the eyes of Nus-Nus and to see the ways in which it was both different and similar to the Moroccan court. But although there are lots of descriptions of food, clothing, furnishings etc, the pace of the story never slows down and there’s always something happening.

Nus-Nus and Alys are fictional characters but Moulay Ismail, the Sultan, was a real person and is considered to be one of the cruelest rulers in history (one of his nicknames is ‘the bloodthirsty’). This is something that Jane Johnson portrays very convincingly – based on some of the things he does in this novel, living in his household must have been a terrifying experience! Nus-Nus and the other slaves and courtiers are constantly in fear of their lives, knowing that they are at the mercy of his whim, and they have learned to be extra careful when they see him dressed in yellow as this indicates he’s in a particularly murderous mood. Ismail’s wife, Zidana, is also portrayed as a villain; a jealous, scheming person who uses poisons and witchcraft to attack her enemies.

Of the two narrators, I didn’t find Alys Swann a very memorable character but I did really like Nus-Nus. In fact, he was the main reason why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Nus-Nus was captured from his Senufo tribe as a young man and before coming to the Sultan’s palace had spent some time assisting a British doctor who taught him to read and write and to speak English. These skills make him invaluable to both Ismail and Zidana and are the reason why he’s in a position where he’s able to befriend and help Alys. As a black slave and a eunuch, Nus-Nus is often treated unkindly by other members of the court, but still has a lot of dignity and courage. I thought he was a wonderful character.

The story does touch on some controversial subjects including slavery, racism and prejudice, torture and cruelty (some of the things described in the novel are very brutal and characters lose their lives in some gruesome ways) but I thought everything was handled sensitively. The only criticism I really have is that Alys didn’t have a very distinctive voice; sometimes she didn’t sound any different from Nus-Nus and I didn’t immediately realise the narrator had changed. Apart from that, The Sultan’s Wife was exciting, informative and swept me away to another time and place, which is what I’m always looking for in historical fiction. I loved it!

Review: The Saffron Gate by Linda Holeman

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Linda Holeman’s books are perfect comfort reading for me. She writes the kind of historical fiction I love, with just the right combination of romance, history and adventure. One of the things I like about her books is the way she chooses such interesting settings (19th century Afghanistan in The Moonlit Cage, for example, or British-ruled India in In a Far Country). The Saffron Gate is set in 1930s Morocco, a time and place I know very little about, but Holeman really makes the setting come alive, from the noise and bustle of the souks in Marrakesh, the taste of hot couscous and mint tea, the vibrant colours of the trees and flowers.

But Morocco in the 1930s can be a dangerous place for a woman on her own, as our narrator soon discovers. Her name is Sidonie O’Shea and she’s travelling to North Africa from her home in Albany, New York in search of her fiancé Etienne Duverger, who disappeared without word, leaving behind a mysterious letter from his sister in Marrakesh. When Sidonie arrives in Morocco she realises the enormity of her task – she has no idea where to start looking for Etienne and it seems that certain people are determined to stop her from finding him at all costs. As Sidonie continues to search, she begins to fall in love with Morocco and at the same time uncovers some important truths about both Etienne and herself.

There were times when I wanted to throw this book across the room in disgust, not because it was badly written, but because one of the characters was just so horrible and so cruel to Sidonie I didn’t think I could bear to read any more. Not only that, but Sidonie is far too innocent and trusting, which started to frustrate me after a while. Somewhere in the middle of the book though, the story began to go in a different direction to what I was expecting and I started to feel more hopeful of a happy ending. Whether I got one or not I’ll leave you to find out for yourself.

I learned a lot from this book about the role of women in 1930s Morocco, how they lived, and how they were scorned and looked down upon if they didn’t have a husband. There was also a lot of information about their fashions, customs, superstitions – and some fascinating details, such as the rituals of the hammam (public baths).

I’ve enjoyed all of the Linda Holeman books that I’ve read, but I think this one has been my favourite so far. I would highly recommend The Saffron Gate to anyone who likes to read long historical fiction novels that allow you to immerse yourself in another culture for a while.