Newton ended his remarks by pointing out there are two kinds of novel brought together in this relatively short book (188 pages): a "fast novel", strongly plotted so that you push ahead "just to know what happens", and "a slow cooker that you'll read for the politics and the history and the complicated characters".
That the latter may not appeal to all tastes was indicated in Dan Slevin's review for Radio New Zealand when he complained that after a fast start the book "goes on a bit" in the middle chapters, especially in the "long digression" into the history of the Palestinian problem.
The opening chapter certainly throws the reader into the world of the fast-paced political thriller; like the opening of Liam McIlvanney's fine 2009 Scotland-Ulster thriller, All the Colours of the Town, it presents a political assassination as seen by a neutral spectator who has no idea what is going on. Christopher Hare, an England-based food writer on the job in a restaurant in Nice, sees a woman shoot a male diner and his female companion, and impulsively injects himself into the situation by picking up the bag she drops on the floor, running after her with it, and jumping into the getaway car behind her.
We want to know what will happen to him, but that will not be resolved until the final chapter. In between are eight chapters in which the emphasis shifts from what will happen in the present to why and how the characters are where they are - the personal and political catastrophes in their pasts that have brought together Christopher and Hawwa Habash, the assassin, in the same getaway car and then in the same temporary safe house.
The eight chapters of the "slow cooker" take place in a narrative present of about 12 hours, with the point of view alternating between Hawwa (three chapters) and Christopher (two chapters) in the safe house and Mary Pepper, Christopher's former wife, in London trying to decide what to do in response to the strange email message he sends her from the safe house (three chapters). In these chapters the three characters move towards important decisions in the present, but are moved to remember their pasts, from which the reader can piece together three complex back stories and understand the characters emerging from them.
We see of Christopher his Tolaga Bay childhood with his Italian grandmother and Maori grandfather, the rise and fall of his career as chef and then fashionable food writer in London, his professional partnership and then failed marriage with Mary, his photographer. We get the sense of a self-involved, self-indulgent, self-pitying man who can understand neither the effect of Palestinian politics on Hawwa's life nor the sexual politics of his own unequal relationship with Mary.
He is at the end of his tether, his vocation lost and his marriage gone, and needs a radical facing-up and change if he is to remake his life. We see of Mary the catastrophes of her youthful drug addiction, the suicide of her art-school Jewish lover (over his shame at the Israeli complicity in the 1982 massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon), the self-chosen catastrophe of her marriage to Christopher and her extrication of herself from it as ironically she becomes a name in the world of sensation art for her photographs of food as pretentious "art" and as suggesting sex organs.
We see of Hawwa the effect on her life of the Palestinian history: the catastrophes of the 1948 Palestinian exile before she was born, the 1970 violent ejection of the Palestinian fedayeen from Jordan where her family lived in exile, her marriage to a Palestinian man who she learned was selling arms to both sides in the Lebanon civil war and involved in organ trafficking and other dirty businesses, and the death of her son in the Lebanon conflict. We see her as one born in the environment of exile, attempting to escape it through a medical education and her marriage, and then, when she faces up to the implications of her personal revolt, attempting to assuage her guilt and align herself with her people by serving Palestinian refugees and by accepting a mission to assassinate her former husband as a traitor to the cause.
These "slow-cooker" chapters are the heart of the novel and a challenge to the reader, who must piece together the chronology and pattern of the personal back stories, which are presented in remembered, subjective fragments, and of the Palestinian story, which is referred to but never explained (Wedde has a note at the back as to his written sources, and he dedicates the book to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose work he has translated; and to "the people who taste his words in their speech").
More difficultly, the reader must also try to piece together the novel's implicit attitude towards history and personal ethical choice and responsibility. In an interview with Kim Hill, Wedde said "irrationality is the point" - the irrationality of history (a burden to the Palestinians that they must live with) and the irrationality of our impulsive personal choices, for which we must accept responsibility by dealing with the results. There are no simple answers for the characters - Hawwa comes off well, Christopher disastrously, Mary somewhere between.
This is not an easy novel, but rather one to be pondered andre-read, finally more an existential exploration than a political thriller.
But it is also a novel so vividly and sensuously written that the challenge it presents can be a pleasure.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
