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joreads7's review against another edition
4.0
Mantel is a great writer and she creates a compelling and creepy atmosphere, but the plotting of this book is basically non existent, and the ending was very unsatisfying.
balancinghistorybooks's review
4.0
I read one of Hilary Mantel's earliest works, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, as part of my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. I love how varied her books are; rather than deal with a historical setting here, as she does in the much-lauded Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety, this is a contemporary story of Saudi Arabia. Whilst it has not been favourably reviewed on the whole on Goodreads, Time Out calls it 'A Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw with an insidious power to grip', and Literary Review heralds it a 'stunning Orwellian nightmare'.
The novel feels rather autobiographical, in that Mantel herself lived in Saudi Arabia, and Africa before that, as her protagonists here do. Mantel is most involved with the story of Frances here, a British woman who has moved to the country with her husband Andrew, who has found work on a large and well-paid project as an architect.
Well written, as Mantel's work always is, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is culturally fascinating. It gives one a feeling for the city of Jeddah, where Frances and Andrew settle, immediately, as well as Frances' position within it. Her life soon feels very claustrophobic, largely unable, as she is, to leave the block of flats in which the couple live; this is due to the incredibly subservient position of women in the male-dominated society, which leaves her - a trained cartographer - unable to work, as well as the stifling heat which grips the city for most of the year. Frances has been made almost a prisoner in her own home, and has to rely on the friendship of the other women in the building to wile away those long, hot hours in which Andrew is working.
On her first morning in Jeddah, after an exhausting journey the previous day, Frances is accidentally trapped within the flat: 'When Andrew locked me in, I thought, it doesn't matter, because I won't be going out today. As if not going out would be unusual. I didn't know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.' She writes later that the regime in Saudi Arabia, which so suppresses females, 'is like being under house arrest. Or a banned person.'
Incredibly enlightening, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is told from two perspectives - that of the omniscient third person, as well as Frances' diary entries. A lot of people have mentioned in their reviews that barely anything happens within the novel, but I think that this works well; there is a mystery at its heart, but this is very much a secondary storyline. Rather, Mantel is more concerned with demonstrating what life is like in Saudi Arabia for a woman, and a European one at that. I found the novel engaging and engrossing, and felt that it is just as valid now as it was when it was published thirty years ago. Very little seems to have changed, in fact. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a tense and chilling novel, despite the fact that one can feel the claustrophobic, searing heat of Jeddah throughout.
The novel feels rather autobiographical, in that Mantel herself lived in Saudi Arabia, and Africa before that, as her protagonists here do. Mantel is most involved with the story of Frances here, a British woman who has moved to the country with her husband Andrew, who has found work on a large and well-paid project as an architect.
Well written, as Mantel's work always is, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is culturally fascinating. It gives one a feeling for the city of Jeddah, where Frances and Andrew settle, immediately, as well as Frances' position within it. Her life soon feels very claustrophobic, largely unable, as she is, to leave the block of flats in which the couple live; this is due to the incredibly subservient position of women in the male-dominated society, which leaves her - a trained cartographer - unable to work, as well as the stifling heat which grips the city for most of the year. Frances has been made almost a prisoner in her own home, and has to rely on the friendship of the other women in the building to wile away those long, hot hours in which Andrew is working.
On her first morning in Jeddah, after an exhausting journey the previous day, Frances is accidentally trapped within the flat: 'When Andrew locked me in, I thought, it doesn't matter, because I won't be going out today. As if not going out would be unusual. I didn't know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.' She writes later that the regime in Saudi Arabia, which so suppresses females, 'is like being under house arrest. Or a banned person.'
Incredibly enlightening, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is told from two perspectives - that of the omniscient third person, as well as Frances' diary entries. A lot of people have mentioned in their reviews that barely anything happens within the novel, but I think that this works well; there is a mystery at its heart, but this is very much a secondary storyline. Rather, Mantel is more concerned with demonstrating what life is like in Saudi Arabia for a woman, and a European one at that. I found the novel engaging and engrossing, and felt that it is just as valid now as it was when it was published thirty years ago. Very little seems to have changed, in fact. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a tense and chilling novel, despite the fact that one can feel the claustrophobic, searing heat of Jeddah throughout.
sarah42783's review
4.0
An excellent read! I very much enjoyed Mantel's writing style and can't wait to read her other books!
lnatal's review
3.0
From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:
Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.
Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.
She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.
Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07npwcs
1* Beyond Black
3* The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
3* A Place of Greater Safety
3* The Present Tense
3* Kinsella in His Hole
CR Eight Months On Ghazzah Street
Thomas Cromwell Trilogy:
4* Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
4* Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
TR The Mirror and the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)
Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever. In an unusual collaboration, the author has revisited the book to create, with the abridger, this new ten-part serialisation.
Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, but when her husband's work takes them to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive and watchful.
She soon discovers that the streets are not a woman's territory. Confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self beginning to dissolve. She hears footsteps, sounds of distress from the supposedly empty flat above. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.
Reader: Anna Maxwell Martin
Author: Hilary Mantel
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Alexa Moore
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07npwcs
1* Beyond Black
3* The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
3* A Place of Greater Safety
3* The Present Tense
3* Kinsella in His Hole
CR Eight Months On Ghazzah Street
Thomas Cromwell Trilogy:
4* Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
4* Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
TR The Mirror and the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)
footnotes_and_tangents's review
Beware of happy endings and tidy resolutions…
“Life is not like detective stories.”
I’m starting to think that Mantel writes in a genre entirely of her own creation, that we should just call the Terror Novel.
Master of the omniscient narrator, she leaves her protagonists with nowhere to hide. She follows them through their public and private lives, and she’ll follow them to their graves. In her more famous books, she pursues Cromwell and Desmoulins off-stage with unflinching precision.
Here the protagonist is a thirty-something Englishwoman, holed up in a Jeddah apartment, trying to make sense of the world around her. Something terrifying is happening in the apartment above her - and she’s going to try and find out what.
But as with her other Terror Novels, it’s less the mystery, the murder and the motive that interests Mantel. Terror, as opposed to crime fiction, comes from within.
Hilary Mantel said that the day she left Jeddah was the happiest day of her life. If this book is an imprint of all her uneasiness, fears, claustrophobia, foreboding whilst living in Saudi Arabia, you’ve got to believe it was a very happy day indeed.
But does her protagonist escape? Like the infamous fate of Tony Soprano, Mantel places the truth in plain sight and then lets the reader try and find it.
Mantel wrote that this book was about the “vast gulf of misunderstanding between East and West. It was in those misunderstandings that extremism breeds, because the image of the West there was so black and so distorted."
The book was published in 1988. Four years later, Saudi Arabia’s most infamous son would begin his murderous career, putting the word Terror squarely at the centre of modern life.
As is so frequently the case with Mantel, she sees it coming. Not in the turn of the geopolitical screw, but in quiet domestic settings, with the tension rising in the midday heat.
“Life is not like detective stories.”
I’m starting to think that Mantel writes in a genre entirely of her own creation, that we should just call the Terror Novel.
Master of the omniscient narrator, she leaves her protagonists with nowhere to hide. She follows them through their public and private lives, and she’ll follow them to their graves. In her more famous books, she pursues Cromwell and Desmoulins off-stage with unflinching precision.
Here the protagonist is a thirty-something Englishwoman, holed up in a Jeddah apartment, trying to make sense of the world around her. Something terrifying is happening in the apartment above her - and she’s going to try and find out what.
But as with her other Terror Novels, it’s less the mystery, the murder and the motive that interests Mantel. Terror, as opposed to crime fiction, comes from within.
Hilary Mantel said that the day she left Jeddah was the happiest day of her life. If this book is an imprint of all her uneasiness, fears, claustrophobia, foreboding whilst living in Saudi Arabia, you’ve got to believe it was a very happy day indeed.
But does her protagonist escape? Like the infamous fate of Tony Soprano, Mantel places the truth in plain sight and then lets the reader try and find it.
Mantel wrote that this book was about the “vast gulf of misunderstanding between East and West. It was in those misunderstandings that extremism breeds, because the image of the West there was so black and so distorted."
The book was published in 1988. Four years later, Saudi Arabia’s most infamous son would begin his murderous career, putting the word Terror squarely at the centre of modern life.
As is so frequently the case with Mantel, she sees it coming. Not in the turn of the geopolitical screw, but in quiet domestic settings, with the tension rising in the midday heat.
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