The young American couple are painted as mindlessly innocent, or, to use a term New prefers, guileless. The naive assumption that all the world will respond in kind to their own smiling good nature is what clearly infuriates New, an academic philosopher by training. Their incomprehension and anger when scenes of the 9:11 attacks are broadcast on the airport TV are, for him, a foretaste of what is to follow. But he anticipates the charge of anti-Americanism by making Margaret, a partly sympathetic character, American as well, as if in compensation.
Coming to terms with a Christopher New novel is always a difficult balancing act. On the one hand he offers a sardonic and distanced view of the colonial experience, basically taking the position that neither party understands the other. But on the other hand an authorial bitterness time and again stains the picture.
As a philosopher New doubtless feels an automatic impulse to look down on lesser beings as irredeemably short-sighted and self-serving. But there also appears to be a more personal disenchantment at work, hidden behind the cultivated display of understanding everything and committing himself to nothing.
What essentially you have in A Small Place in the Desert is a small-minded suburbanite (Clare), less than transparent Egyptians (Ahmed, his cousin Yussuf, and his brother Omar), mindless idiots (Chad and Debbie), a bored wife (Margaret), plus a supporting cast of unwilling but uncomplicated British soldiers.
The only remaining character is the traumatized and backward-looking Paul, in places an authorial mouthpiece, but more usually someone who lets his wife make all the decisions and doesn't quite know what to think.
What's missing is any character with mental distinction, lofty purpose, or a sense of personal integrity, some equivalent of the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, for example. But there's never anyone like this in any New novel.
Everyone is subject to the same pervasive authorial disdain, either a fool or a rogue. And this is what prevents these books from rising to a level of real distinction, interesting though they frequently are.
News' disdainfulness makes too prominent a contribution to the mix, with the result that, though he can make compulsive reading, depression is the end result of any protracted contact with his stories.
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