Book Review
The Caliph's House, A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah, (Doubleday £15 pp356) is a story of home-ownership abroad, of wrecking-crew builders, haunted nights, hidden rooms, stolen title deeds and a plague of bees. Shah discovers how to hire cooks, fire an architect and bail builders out of jail. He appeases gangsters and aspires to be patient. “Whenever I ran through the house raving,” he writes of the apparent inability of Moroccan workmen to finish any job, “the master craftsmen would grin broadly and exclaim that only Allah was complete.”
The book romps between western scepticism and Casablancan superstition. Shah assails mystic tradition on one hand, and then, on the other, pricks a finger and bleeds into a lavatory to please the jinn. He buys a tortoise with divine spirit. He learns to guard against house fires by hanging a salted frog outside the front door. The conclusion is clamorous and hilarious; he employs 24 exorcists, marshalled by a pot-smoking pimp in a gold lamé turban and accompanied by a huge goat with good karma, to rid his house of evil.
Read the full review by RORY MACLEAN. Times on line
The Caliph’s House is available at the Books First price of £13.50 on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India will be published by Viking in June.
Tags: Morocco, Fes, Maghreb, literature
2 comments:
Salam!
Thanks Hale - Your own blog is looking great and as always, very interesting.
Zany is writing a book about Fez, but with a very different slant (thankfully!).
Stay well.
Lol, why do I read you ... it seems you are holding the apple. I loved the sound of this book ... thank you for posting about it!!!
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