A CHANGE OF CLIMATE
By Hilary Mantel
Marian Wood/Owl, 321 pages, $12 paper
EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET
By Hilary Mantel
Marian Wood/Owl, 278 pages, $12 paper
Like Paul Theroux, this ambitious British writer spent her young adulthood living and working overseas, in places–Botswana, Saudi Arabia–that serve as characters in her writing as much as her human protagonists do. And like Doris Lessing, whose best work hers sometimes resembles, she has tried her hand at varied genres. “An Experiment in Love,” published here last year and newly available in paperback, was a coming-of-age story about a university scholarship girl going into a tailspin as she makes her way through 1970s London. Hilary Mantel’s earlier “A Place of Greater Safety” was brilliant, edgy, historical fiction that caught, with minimal comment, the jittery, violent flux of the French Revolution.
Now come two novels about British expatriates abroad, first published in 1988 and 1994, and reaching American readers for the first time as paperback originals. “A Change of Climate” is the more recent, and a perfect introduction to Mantel. In it, all her gifts are on display: an ease in handling a large canvas of characters, a supple movement back and forth through time, an insightful linking of private quandary and social issue, a passionate intelligence that appeals equally to the mind and senses.
Ralph and Anna Eldred once served as Christian missionaries in 1950s South Africa and Bechuanaland (now Botswana). In 1980, when we meet them, they are still continuing their charity work in England with a Norwich-based trust founded by Ralph’s clergyman father. Ralph’s feelings about this inherited family “business” have been ambivalent from the start, however. He was all but blackmailed into it by a father who saw his son’s ambitions for an academic career in geology as heresy.
Ironically, the trust offered Ralph escape from his father, just as it offered Anna refuge from a background of similarly grim religious orthodoxy. When, shortly after marrying, they were posted to a mission in a black township outside Pretoria, they threw themselves wholeheartedly into their do-gooding task, despite their tepid faith in their own religious motives. It wasn’t long before they found themselves violating apartheid law. Deported to rural Bechuanaland, they went from mere law-breaking to full-blown catastrophe.
The mystery of what happened in Bechuanaland supplies much of the novel’s suspense but isn’t its only source of tension. The four Eldred children’s skepticism about their parents’ work, Ralph’s out-of-character attraction to a maverick female neighbor, the problem-ridden “Sad Cases” (drug addicts, homeless teens) whom the Eldreds regularly take in–all complicate the life of this secret-ridden family.
Mantel handles each complication, each interlocking fate, with a quiet wit and a keen psychological insight. She has a knack for bringing even her peripheral characters to life in a sentence or two. Here, for instance, is the archbishop of Capetown, briefing Ralph and Anna in 1956: “The archbishop seemed shy. Could an archbishop be shy? He spoke gruffly, in short, broken phrases; the phrases were, none the less, well planned.” No fancy footwork there–yet the man is palpably present on the page before we even hear
what he has to say.
Mantel’s portraits of landscape are equally vivid. Summer skies in Bechuanaland are “violet, sullen; when storms came, the downpour whipped garden snakes from their heat trances. Green mamba, boomslang, spitting cobra: after the rains, the ground seethed like a living carpet. Six legs, eight legs, no legs: everything moved.”
The “change of climate” that gives the book its title goes well beyond the obvious contrast in British and African meteorological conditions, or the prehistoric weather changes evidenced in fossil records (the chief inspiration behind Ralph’s love of geology). Changes in political climate and the more elusive climate of memory also come into it, as Ralph and Anna find it impossible to translate their African experiences into terms that have any meaning in England.
For the Eldred children those experiences, so far-removed in time and geography, make their parents inscrutable to them. What they can’t know is that Ralph and Anna’s very determination to do good is a kind of disguise, suppressing trauma, resentments and flaws of character that must eventually surface. It takes deception and betrayal to reveal that truth, just as it took unworldly innocence to lead Anna and Ralph into situations of betrayal and deception.
Mantel’s eye for such paradoxes informs every chapter of “A Change of Climate.” In so artfully twining the disparate worlds of this family of good, flawed souls, she creates a masterful study of how deeds and consequences, action and memory, can become insupportably estranged from one another.
“Eight Months on Ghazzah Street,” a worthy effort and absorbing read, isn’t in quite the same league. Set in Jeddah in 1984-85, it focuses on British couple Andrew and Frances Shore–he’s a construction engineer, she’s a cartographer–who move to Saudi Arabia for the sake of Andrew’s career without fully fathoming how the move will affect Frances. Unable to find suitable employment and hampered by Saudi strictures against women driving, Frances finds her surroundings unreadable, her social life circumscribed and her husband increasingly uncommunicative. (Mantel captures Andrew’s absorption in his work marvelously when she tells us that construction sites are “the pleasure gardens of his mind.”)
It doesn’t help that the Shores have chosen to live in a city apartment rather than the suburb-like compound where most expatriates dwell. Frances’ exchanges with her housewife neighbors–one Pakistani, the other Saudi Arabian–are awkward at best, though kindly intentioned. More unsettling is the “empty” apartment upstairs from which tortured sounds sometimes emerge: a mystery to which her neighbors may well hold clues.
Culture shock, rumor, paranoia, marital crisis–all blend in a tale of increasing menace. Mantel’s insistence on viewing Saudi Arabia through Frances’ ordinary, blinkered eyes makes the book an intriguingly downbeat contrast to the nonfiction writings of such gregarious Middle East hands as Judith Miller (“God Has Ninety-Nine Names”) or Peter Theroux (“Sandstorms”). The near-hallucinatory detail of Jeddah, a money-fueled city in a constant state of expansion and construction, matches the best passages in “A Change of Climate,” while the subterfuge of the expatriate community in eluding local prohibitions against alcohol and socializing between the sexes has a straight-from-the-trenches feel to it.
Still, one wants more assurance that Mantel’s understanding of her setting exceeds her hero’s. Frances’ sour wit and growing depression are persuasive, but too much of what she sees around her verges on caricature. In the end, it’s the mystery plot–and especially Mantel’s refusal to suppy the usual whodunit wrapup–that is the book’s strongest asset, making “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street” a work of greater promise than accomplishment. The good news is that her promise has since been gloriously fulfilled by “A Change of Climate,” “A Place of Greater Safety” and “An Experiment in Love.”
