"Lunch was in the qaa, at an oval table cast from marble dust and inlaid along the top with swirling Persian-blue tesserae arranged as a peacock displaying its tail. Matching benches curved down both sides of the table. Only Lady Nafisa had a chair. (...)
Food as politics and food as blackmail: both theories had been regurgitated more times than anyone could remember. But food as an elaborate dance, somewhere between etiquette and preening display, that was new to Raf. Though not to Isk, where the conspicuous consumption -- not of rich or rare ingredients, though both were there -- but of time itself was as ancient as the elaborate laws governing hospitality.
Time given was what was on display.
In Isk, just as in Tunis, Marrakesh or Fez, ceremonial food required preparation: the more preparation, the greater the respect being offered to guests. Tradition also demanded that the ingredients be divided into small portions, wrapped in filo or hidden beneath pastry in pies, rolled in crushed nuts or stuffed into vegetables that had been lovingly hollowed out or cored. Food bought at a stall or fast-food joint was different. Nobody expected Burger King to be anything other than cheap, swift and anodyne. But in the home, it was almost an insult to offer guests food that looked as if preparing it took anything less than total commitment.
Served with the roast kid was a silver-edged clay bowl of saffron rice, plus a dish of red couscous, a chicken tajine where the juices had been sweetened with honey and reduced to a sticky syrup, fried red mullet with marjoram and fresh matlou bread, which Lady Nafisa asked Raf to break and portion out in order of precedence. Hani got her chunk last, being both female and a child."
Isk. Welcome to El Iskandryia. And watch your back!
In a culinary passage which takes a tale of murder, hatred and love, and multi-layered intrigue on apace, Jon Courtenay Grimwood presents but a few facets of the free city on Egypt's Mediterranean shore, built and rebuilt "on the rubble of its own history".
"Venerable and elegant, with a taste for fresh blood," the sweltering metropolis in an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire is as vital a character in 'Pashazade: The First Arabesk' as any of the people who inhabit its numerous worlds.
Before he's cast into the seething snake-pit of Iskandryian affairs when his Aunt Nafisa springs him from a Seattle prison, ZeeZee has no idea that he was fathered by a man of prominence and power. Awaiting him are a potential wife, a murder riddle, sudden violence -- and a new identity and social standing as Ashraf Bey.
The pashazade soon finds that his life depends on his wits, an aptitude for combat and the unravelling of a mystery where the bodies begin to mount up. And the reader gradually learns of the twisted, troubled trail that brings Raf to mid-21st century Isk from the America that brokered a settlement in 1916 between London and Berlin, victorious in the Great World War. Five years after Woodrow Wilson cut the deal, the Prussian empire collapsed, leaving chunks of Europe and the Near East in the hands of the Austro-Hungarians and the Sublime Porte in Stambul.
Isk is more than ever a marketplace of cultures, a free port whose relative independence and religious tolerance under Egypt's Khedive and his powerful German advisor, General Saeed Koenig Pasha, is sustained because of its importance to the world's trade in commodities and information.
Trouble starts with a corpse and a meticulous, hot but ruinously alcoholic onetime Los Angeles cop, Felix Abrinsky, the city's Chief of Detectives. There are faint echoes of Raymond Chandler in the tale, along with classic 'Casablanca (iMDB)' and, of course, Lawrence Durrell, who made the city such a living, heaving part of his 'Alexandria Quartet'.
Some of the critics who showered Grimwood with glory when 'Pashazade' came out in 2001, the first part of an Ashraf Bey trilogy, made much of perceived parallels with Durrell's work.
This writer, however, has become very much his own man. His French and his Brits have second-bit parts, mainly as tourists.
"File under Science Fiction" the publisher orders on the back of the book, but what on earth for? 'Pashazade' sits just as well on quality crime thriller shelves and is also a strong contribution to mainstream modern literature. The style is sometimes leisurely with evocative detail, sometimes as swift as the bloodshed and betrayal that stain the city's concealed foundations and ZeeZee's life.
Ashraf Bey gets little time to dig into his own origins and mature to handle some almost unprecedented emotions -- such as love -- if he and anybody he learns to care about are to survive. Acts of brutality are unsparingly recounted by an author who last month told SF Crowsnest that "I hate sanitised violence. It's morally and intellectually dishonest to have somebody stand back up after getting coshed or shot. Violence hurts, it breaks things and it wrecks families and destroys communities."
That's a good interview and Grimwood's an interesting man, with a slick "official site", as deftly constructed as his prose.
The cyber-punk label slapped on his pre-trilogy work has gone unmentioned here because while the technology in 'Pashazade' is clever, convincing and essential to the story, it's simply slipped in with the same cunning hand that reveals just enough of the pasts of his cast to flesh them out without treading on the reader's imagination.
Hani, the kid, couldn't do without Ali-Din, an unusually gifted puppy who keeps her informed as well as sane, though Aunt Nafisa is much irritated by this pet and the puddles it leaves in the nursery...
As to the reader, you get snatches of what existed in the last century and what didn't. Music by Gorecki, the composer who became super-trendy in the 1990s, does passing service as tasteful wallpaper, but the Holocaust that was the seed for his best-selling Third Symphony is not one of the crimes evoked to haunt this parallel future.
Grimwood teases and surprises you, stimulating the neurons like a rich dark cup of Arabica with the scent and flavour of the setting steaming off the pages. Satirical? Yes, he can be when he wants to. Sexy too. Isk wouldn't be what it is without plenty of that and the mess it can make for people.
[Next off the review shelf here (and for Blogcritics) is not the sequel this time, though I'll undoubtedly get to 'Effendi' and 'Felaheen'.
The extract -- this seems to have become a habit, but I like to let writers speak for themselves -- and the comments will be a matter of another near future, but with the focus on hard science again. Like the late Carl Sagan in 'Contact', Gregory Benford takes on astrophysics and what could be "out there". The latter is intelligent and seems rather alarming. I've begun chewing on 'Eater' (HarperCollins/Eos, first published in 2000). So far, so good.]
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