New Welsh Review, Autumn 2010 Mary-Ann Constantine applauds a new novel which explores the personal and the political At a time when politics feels like so much empty fizz this is a salutary read: a properly political novel, about human beings implicated in world events. Into Suez is an intelligent exposition of the damage done by and to people in 'political' situations; it is a book about politics turns into history, and how history curls up inside the fists of modern conflict. It is also a book about the forming and breaking of bonds, bonds of love and attraction and, equally powerfully, guilt. It is, besides, a rather fine dissection of Britishness trapped and exaggerated through a prism of heat and colour; all class and cleanliness and cups of tea. The heart of Stevie Davies's eleventh novel is set in 1949, with post-war Britain grimly hanging on to its occupation of the Suez Canal Zone, and Egypt on the verge of throwing the British out. It is a place of tension, ripe for misunderstanding. The story follows Ailsa Roberts as she travels with her small daughter Nia from blitzed and rationed Britain to be reunited with her husband Joe. On the voyage she meets Mona, an officer's wife whose socialist principles have brought her down to share the crowded noisy bunks of the common wives: "slumming it with the hoi polloi" thinks Ailsa at first; "You think you're an angel visiting us from heaven". She is, as it turns out, an angel of sorts, and dangerous as angels usually are: a passionate Palestinian from Jerusalem whose house in Ismailia becomes a magnet for the Arab dispossessed, her intense friendship transgresses all unspoken class rules. This relationship, exacerbated and intensified by the political situation, wakes Ailsa's intelligent mind into life and depth, and brings her some understanding of the land in which she finds herself, of the people , and of her own deeply ambiguous position. But it also complicates her deep and loyal love for her narrow-minded husband and, ultimately, destroys her. Fifty years on, Nia, armed with her dead mother's journals, comes back to try and make sense of the woman with whom she has had such a difficult relationship. This frame narrative, which wisely does not intrude too much from Ailsa's own, gives Davies the opportunity to point up various depressing parallels in British Middle East policy then and now, and to explore the gap between the child's and the mother's perceptions of the same events. Nia's early memories - bleeding porpoises, a buried doll, an Arab walking away into the desert - are convincingly visceral; Davies does childhood well. This same gap in perception becomes the uncomprehending, and for most of the book, incomprehensible, space in which a terrible transformation takes place - where Ailsa's blood for Nia changes from the intense physicality of a mother and small child (‘The bliss it has been, she thought, to be your mother, Nia, the thought rocked her’) to that of a 'machine-mother', who performs numb, necessary tasks and nothing more. Britishness abroad is beautifully evoked by a cluster of army wives, from the abrasive Barbara Brean to the washed-out, manipulative Irene White. Their newly built quarters in El Marah on the very edge of Ismailia's sprawl are ‘brick built semis that could have been built anywhere in Britain except that they were surrounded by a sea of sand’. Davies paints their strange lives here with ironic sympathy and a fabulous attention to detail: each house is a little island of Empire, serving up reassurance in ‘teaspoonfuls of Daddy Bear's custard’ and "braised chops, very tender, with carrots and onions cooked in the gravy, cauliflowers and peas’. The defensiveness of the British is revealed in what they eat, and what they do not eat, what they wear and, endlessly, their attitude to the "other" - which, of course, does not even have to be dark-skinned and clad in flowing robes, as brittle German bride Hedwig, married to one of Joe's "chums", and even Ailsa herself, are quick to understand. The nature of the lifelong bond between Ailsa and Irene, a downright mystery to Nia for most of her life and to the reader for most of the novel, is at the heart of the event that turns Ailsa from a living, breathing person into a shell. No small part of this book's success is its deft way with plotting - and I freely admit that, first time around, I put down my reviewer's pencil, and read, greedily, for answers.
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