Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

In war-torn Lebanon, a beautiful French woman fights a war of spy versus spy

There is no privacy in Beirut. In the hotel lobbies and high-class bars of this beautiful Eastern capital, intelligencers of every stripe hide in plain British spies and Nazi moles, Free French operatives and the lackeys of Vichy France. Stalin has his men here, as do the Zionists who would turn British Palestine into a haven for the Jewish people. There are agents of every race, gender, and nationality—and they are all at one another’s throats. Armande Herne is not one of them—but she will be soon enough.
 
A French woman raised in England, Armande came to Beirut after her husband joined the navy. When the French army hands the city over to the British, an arms deal draws Armande into the shadowy side of this city of intrigue, taking her on a desert adventure that will change the war—or leave her dead in the sand.

Genres: Espionage

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

British author of mostly thrillers, though among 37 books he also published children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is' Rogue Male' (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted, in 1941 filmed by Fritz Lang as 'Man Hunt'. Household's fast-paced story foreshadowed such international bestsellers as Richard Condon's thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1959), Frederick Forsyth's 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971), and Ken Follett's 'Eye of the Needle' (1978) .

In 1922 Household received his B.A. in English from Magdalen College, Oxford, and between 1922 and 1935 worked in commerce abroad, moving to the US in 1929. During World War II, Household served in the Intelligence Corps in Romania and the Middle East. After the War he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote. In his later years, he lived in Charlton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire, and died in Wardington.

Household also published an autobiography, 'Against the Wind' (1958), and several collections of short stories, which he himself considered his best work.

Reviews

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had read a mesmerizing short story of horror and suspense by this author so it was with great anticipation that I bought this book.

This book is about an English woman Armande who, during WWII, goes to work for the British government in the Middle East.

The positive: I enjoyed reading about all the characters and what they did in Intelligence, also Mid East cultural life during the forties.

But the story went absolutely nowhere! It was never very clear what exactly Armande did. She sold weapons to a group she thought were British but in fact turned out to be Zionists. So she gets fired and travels to Cairo where she tries to make a living. It takes two thirds of the novel to get there.

All the men in the story were interesting and a novel entirely of them would have been fun to read.

Armande is just a cold fish who shows no emotion or any moral compass. A young man who murders someone needs help so she hides him in her apartment until she gets help for him to escape. Why? Who knows. I can't figure out why she does anything.

I still don't know what the plot was. So all in all: blah.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a charming and romantic wartime adventure taking place across the Middle East. Household muses and predicts the outcome of international and internal actors in the Israel/Palestine conflict that has come to consume a large role in modern news outlets. Household uses characters to convey different perspectives, but primarily uses Sergeant Prayle for his own perspective on the future of the region. As someone who served in the area as a member of the Intelligence, Household brings a high level of veracity to the descriptive settings and sometimes sordid dealings that our heroine, Armande bumbles through. Armande, for her part, is upright and patriotic, but is often misconstrued as an unaccompanied woman of mystery in the Middle East. Her original bumbling gives way to an exciting - although never very surprising - adventure through Security and Intelligence channels, in which a person's loyalties are never quite as clear as they may initially seem. The story does gradually shift the political and international story into a sweet romance, simply by trading the background focus, but it's a natural and hopeful course in sharp contrast to the standings of Jews and Arabs, both at the end of the novel and at the time of Household's writing, shortly before the formation of Israel as a state. This book is able then to serve both as a fascinating historical document and as a wholly engaging adventure.

[jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lame, lazy writing fatally mars what could have been an exciting cloak and dagger story of intrigue in the middle east during WWII. Strangely, for an action story, nothing much happens other than conversation until the very end. But even then the dialogue is far from scintillating. It seems invented rather than naturally flowing from the characters. Further, the character the book is ostensibly about is the least interesting or defined, as if the author had no clue what motivated her. And, finally, and perhaps most annoying, on nearly every page, sometimes more than once per page, the author expresses generalizations and stereotypes about virtually every group or 'type' of person existent in the book, e.g. "like all Arabs", or women, or Jews, or French, or Americans, or British, or you name it. I was glad to donate this one to the local library.

[Nicholas George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Armande Herne, the heroine/protagonist of this novel, is an intriguing character--a British/French woman doing her part for the British war effort in Lebanon during the final days of WWII while her husband serves elsewhere. She gets involved with a gun running scandal and finds herself "black listed"--not in trouble legally, but unable to get a position. She ends up in Cairo where she becomes a dancer and eventually falls in love with a British captain. There's a lot of speculation about the state of the world at the time and the odds against the Israeli state succeeding. This comes at the expense of a decent story and traditional plot line. I liked Armande but wasn't too invested in what would happen to her.