Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
The body of a night club singer is found in waste land outside a desert town a long way south of Algiers. It’s 1988 and Algeria has become an unruly country since de-colonisation; the government is Socialist in name but conditions for ordinary people are dire. Food and medicines are in short supply, the taps run dry, there are power cuts. Everything costs too much and there is no work. No legitimate work, that is. People lower their sights, do whatever presents itself; there is a miasma of easy corruption in this country that is ostensibly secular but where one prays to God to be lenient for small sins. Nevertheless, as one character says: life here is a case of dog eat dog. Which is how a respectable Arab girl came to be singing in a night club under an assumed name in order to escape her own family who would incarcerate her as a whore.
Zaza was a beauty, a luscious draw for the Sahara Hotel where she also acted as a spy for her employer, keeping an eye on the staff, the customers and the police at the same time that she was double-dealing with the police chief himself who needed to know what was brewing at the hotel, a hotbed of intrigue. It’s this man who was to head the investigation into Zaza’s murder: a shady character faced not only with a multitude of suspects, but a suspect himself.
Zaza had spread her net wide. Apart from her obvious protectors there was her fiancé: an open secret, an accountant and a good man. There was Ibrahim, a friend, who sold DVDs and videos (adult items under the counter); there was Kamal the chic receptionist at the Sahara who lusted after her and was made miserable in the face of her arrogance; there was the musician who resented her celebrity…. All were devastated by her death.
Her lovers’ wives hated her; but among women of her own age and class she was a role model although a risky one. Breaking free of the old patriarchism which persisted under the new regime, she had turned the system on its head to use men as they had used women for centuries. She lived a charmed and charming life but she relished power and money and she forgot to look behind her.
Although the murder of Zaza and the subsequent inquiry is the hub of this novel, there are sub-plots involving those connected with her, each fighting his or her own corner with their own problems and ploys, trifling or desperate. There is forgery of certificates and correspondence, blackmail and betrayal, and all carried on under the cloak of everyday living. The reader is spellbound, drawn into this other world where nothing is quite as it appears, where euphemisms abound in juxtaposition with crude intimacies; where love affairs are conducted by men with extraordinary delicacy, the same men who can suddenly erupt into fits of violent rage, spitting obscenities. Repression is rife. The West has psychiatrists and counsellors; Algeria has to make do with faith healers.
One is left with an uneasy sense of the reality of a country in chaos: the old Arab world in collision with western versions of democracy, and no one having any idea how to deal with it except to revolt. The end of the Sahara was civil war.
Not an enjoyable book but certainly one that inspires the reader to seek out more from this perceptive author.
Editor’s Note
Translated by Alexander Elinson
Alexander Elinson teaches Arab literature at Hunter College in NY. He has translated two novels by Youssef Fadel: A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me and A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
