Christopher New is best known as the author of The China Coast Trilogy novels that span a period from the early years of the 20th century to the 1980s and deal with the British presence, as a trading and colonizing power, in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
He went on to write a novel set in India, The Road to Maridur, (reviewed in the Taipei Times of Sept. 8 last year), and now, hot on its heels, comes one set in Egypt, again focusing on the British, this time looking at the bitter military legacy they left in the country.
A recently retired couple, Peter and Clare Saunders, arrive from the UK for an extended vacation. It's Clare's first visit, but Peter has been there before, as an army officer during his period of compulsory military service in the 1950s. Clare knows her husband was in some way traumatized by his Egyptian experiences. She both wants to understand why, and at the same time help him come to terms with his pain through re-visiting the places he knew in such different circumstances 50 years before.
The trip is rather strangely takes place in the heat of mid-summer -- winter is Egypt's main tourist season. But there's an authorial reason for this. New wants to end on Sept. 11, 2001, thereby bringing Arab resentment at Western interference in their affairs up to date. For the same reason New includes two young Americans, Chad and Debbie, in the modern part of the story, their presence serving to highlight the cultural conflicts and mutual incomprehension that persist between Westerners and Arabs.
The novel is written in alternating sections, half dealing with the 21st century vacation, half with events back in the 1950s. The modern sections are written in the present tense ("She watches him sip the wine"), the 1950s ones in the past tense, with Paul referred to as "you" ("You huddled against the sandbags, gales of panic gusting through your body").
The town of Ismailia saw violence between British troops and Egyptians during the struggle to remove the British presence in the 1950s, and this armed engagement, in which the young Paul takes part, forms the book's climax. (The British eventually departed, but worse was still to come for the locals -- the town was devastated by Israeli troops in the October War of 1973).
Seeing his comrades killed in battle -- shot through the neck, in the lungs, in the stomach -- isn't what finally traumatizes the young British conscript, however. Instead, it's seeing what some Egyptians did to a fellow officer's wife, Margaret, with whom he had been having an affair, together with the reaction of one of the British soldiers to the gruesome spectacle.
This louche adultery adds a touch of Graham Greene, not for the first time in a New novel. To make the picture appropriately complex, New also has the guide to the tourist couple, Ahmed, involved in anti-Western scheming, at least via his family connections.
Whereas Egypt 50 years ago was characterized by street kids snatching the watches from passing British soldiers and armed opposition to the British military presence, modern Egypt displays a desire to profit from well-heeled Western tourists, and involvement, as much as possible out of the tourists' view, with international resistance to any Western presence in the Middle East.
The different ways of thinking between Arab and Westerner constitutes a current that flows strongly through this novel, though New is far too astute a commentator to allow any perceptible bias one way or another to spoil his portrayal. But there is another contrast present here on which he's less neutral, the perceived difference between the British and the Americans.
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