EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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I had a very good time talking with the women, and learned a great deal from them (without having to deal with flirting, football scores, or dirty jokes). Frances and her husband, Andrew, are not able to get into one of the foreigners' compounds when he goes to work on a new ministry building in Jeddah and instead are installed in a company flat in an apartment block along one of the main roads. When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. They live on Ghazzah Street -- "which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue". Frances really can’t under the women who live behind the veil, and yet the women who wear the veil actually like wearing it.

In the kitchen their housemaid, Elizabeth, was washing glasses—pointless really as they would soon be crated up—and they could hear the separate clink that each one made as she put it down on the drain board. Then he picked up the receiver; the lines were not down that day, and it was a mere ten minutes before he got an answer from the operator in Gaborone.But then you learn how to manage daily life, and for a while the place begins to seem normal, and you’ll even defend the way things are done here, you’ll start explaining to newcomers that it’s all right really – that’s Phase Two. Mantel builds a sense of disorientation, claustrophobia and paranoia in rendering the abysmal quotidian existence of Frances Shore. Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

The Pakistani neighbor of the protagonist, Frances Shore, tries to reassure her by explaining that they don't really stone adulteresses any more -- they throw a few token stones then shoot her. The apartment building on Ghazzah Street offers some diversion -- and some mystery, as there are sounds coming from a supposedly empty apartment.You find a young girl dead outside a high-rise block, after a wild party--you ask yourself, did she fall or was she pushed? Eight Months was first published in 1986, pre- Wolf Hall, and is a reflection of the few years that Mantel spent living in Saudi Arabia.

The double standard that permeates this book, and which Mantel seems unwilling to discuss, spoils any observation she might make about Saudi Arabian attitudes towards women. Much less easy to make a single positive prediction even for the coming week; much less easy to say what, in a month's time, you will have become. Across the road, the nation's only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. Hand hovering over the trolley, he seemed to approve her choice; as if what lay ahead were something to brace yourself for, not to celebrate.The novel works at many levels, however, and is also a crushing indictment of Western materialism and greed. He had an unsparing fund of anecdote, a knowing, dirty laugh; a British passport, and a vaguely Australian accent.