Katariina Kottonen’s Reviews > Eight Months on Ghazzah Street > Status Update

“[Frances] read the information sheet the library woman had given her, with its regulations and list of opening times. There was only one indication that life in Saudi had its tiny upsets. ‘PLEASE,’ begged the hand-out, ‘make EVERY effort to return your books if you have to leave the Kingdom hurriedly and unexpectedly.’”

“‘Haven’t they heard of seatbelts?’ Frances inquired.

‘Bit of a dodgy concept,’ Andrew said. ‘Allah has appointed a term to every life.’

‘Who tells you this stuff?’

‘Oh, guys at work.’”

‘But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.’ (2/2)

‘Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch curb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and the pavements are for walking on.’ (1/2)

‘I didn’t know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.’

The comparison with The Turn of the Screw on the front cover makes more sense now.

The overall impression of the life our heroes are provided with in the Saudi Kingdom is that of hostile comfort.

‘Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.’

There is a lonely shoe, with the other one having gone missing after the customs. There is also a huge cockroach, met in the bathroom and then, in the living-room. I am rather surprised our heroine did not arrange for a meeting between the shoe and the insect.

‘With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.’

‘With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.’

Do not layer the foreshadowing too thickly, will you? (2/2)