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TITLE: Miss Webster and Shérif
AUTHOR: Patricia Duncker
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury ( March 2006)
ISBN: 0 7475 8277 7 PRICE: $29.95 (paperback) 244 pages
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).
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"She was marched across the atrium to yet another security gate. The guards
stood at ease, watching the shifting line of passengers, their hands on their
machine guns".
Our first meeting with Elizabeth Webster is entirely uncharacteristic. She is
uncertain, lost, and soon in tears - an "abandoned, fragile old lady" in a
foreign airport, and unable to speak the language. Nothing in these first few
pages prepares us for the fiercely independent, tough old bird, fluent mistress
of modern swearing as well as Classical French, who emerges from these pages a
short time later.
But Elizabeth Webster has been ill. It was not a stroke, or a heart attack, she
just "came to a dead halt", was "beached", "crash landed in a desert". It was
nothing anyone could really explain, but her doctor - an ugly man with
hideously deformed hands, who is equally as eccentric and stubborn as Elizabeth
- diagnoses a complex form of breakdown, something only the patient herself can
explain and cure. He prescribes a journey, far away, to somewhere totally
unfamiliar, but to a place where her beloved French language is spoken.
So, Elizabeth Webster travels to Morocco. And there, her strength returns and
she again becomes "Miss Webster" - sharp-tongued, fiercely independent,
authoritative, and confidently dismissive of terrorism, bombs and politics, yet
suddenly a little more open to new experiences. She is a wonderful, funny and
believable character, very much in the mould (as she herself suggests) of
Agatha Christie's Miss Marples, but she lives in the 21st Century world of rock
concerts, mobile phones, computers, xenophobia and terrorism.
In Morocco, in the strange desert landscapes and in the unfamiliar culture,
Elizabeth Webster encounters people whose lives, unexpectedly, will change her
own. Back in her English cottage, and back amongst the neighbours she either
loathes, ignores or wars with, she suddenly becomes landlady to a young
Moroccan man who turns up on her doorstep and who, to her own surprise, she
invites to stay.
Shérif is an enigma. He has come to England to be a foreign student at the
nearby university but has not yet been formally accepted. Elizabeth Webster
helps him to negotiate the initial hurdles, experiences first-hand some of the
racism he will encounter in the local community, and becomes a sort of
eccentric aunt to him. She is protective but aloof as she learns, not without
difficulty, to share her house, her meals and her time with this charming
stranger.
And Shérif, polite and thoughtful as he is, remains a stranger: even, at times,
not seeming to recognize his own name. Elizabeth Webster becomes increasingly
aware of this and she notes Shérif's seeming lack of contact with his home and
family and his deep absorption in TV news reports of war and terrorism,
especially in his own Muslim world. It bothers her, but not seriously until,
after a bizarre accident and news coverage of the fall of Baghdad, she decides
to surprise Shérif by taking him home to Morocco for a brief holiday. The
results are surprising, plausible but not always believable, and an interesting
resolution to the story; and Patricia Duncker is a fine enough story-teller to
carry it off.
Miss Webster and Shérif is a funny and absorbing story. Patricia Duncker's
descriptions of the desert landscapes are superb and her accounts of life in a
modern English village (seen, of course, from Miss Webster's point-of-view) are
caustically realistic and wry . With great skill, Drunker smuggles in some of
the most serious issues of our time without ever becoming ponderous and, as one
would hope from a Professor of Creative Writing, this book is beautifully
written, imaginative and enjoyable.
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Copyright © Ann Skea 2005
http://ann.skea.com
Ted Hughes' Pages http://ann.skea.com/THHome |
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