THE WARWICK REVIEW

WILLIAM PALMER

Stevie Davies, Into Suez (Parthian, 2010), ISBN 978-1-906998-00-4, 432 pp, £11.99(hb)

The historical novel has had a bad critical press. And, setting War and Peace and a few others to one side, it must be said that it is often a poor thing, whose premise is that the past is some sort of costume and manner drama and is somehow peculiar and remarkable for that very reason; in its difference, rather than in its historical, biological and emotional continuity with ourselves. But, as William Faulkner once said, "The past is never past". What he meant, and it is a point that obsesses physicists and historians as well as novelists and other artists, is that what some call historical record is no more than the tiniest visible point of the vast, hardly explored worlds of sensation and emotion that make up human life. It is not a matter of recording what is already on record but, as Isaac Bashevis Singer said: "Literature must deal with the past instead of planning the future. It must describe events, not analyse ideas; its topic is the individual, not the masses."

So where does that leave an avowedly political novel such as Into Suez, which deals with actual historically recorded events of recent history that are a direct cause of events in our own time?

The book opens with Ailsa in London towards the end of the Second World War. A sensitive young woman from the country, she lives next door to a group of intensely alive and intelligent women students, arguing ferociously about philosophy and pursuing love affairs with young officers. Ailsa herself is married to Joe Roberts, an aircraft fitter who is fighting in the Western Desert. The first few passages set out the tensions in the young Ailsa's life: her envy of what she sees as the emotionally and intellectually freer life of young women from a more privileged background, and the love she feels for her husband. The second chapter leaps forward in time, to 2003, at the time of the first Iraq war. Ailsa's daughter Nia, in her late fifties, is planning a holiday in Egypt with her grown-up daughter. Nia, a political activist armoured in self righteousness, looks back on life with her mother and can see nothing but a conformist and apolitical woman of her times; her father, killed in Egypt in 1952, she thinks, must have been "a vile man".

Fonunately Nia's share of the narrative is peripheral; she serves to point out the connections between Suez in the 1950s and our present colonial misadventures in the Middle East, but most of the book is concerned with the lives of Joe and Ailsa and the young Nia in Army quarters in the British garrison between 1949 and 1952. From the outset, when they sail on a troop ship, The Empire Glory, Stevie Davies's portrayal of their lives together as a married couple, as parents, and in their separate emotional lives, is written with absolute and moving authority. Joe may share the casual racialism of his generation and its belief in the benefits of a patronising imperialism but he is also shown as a loving husband and father. And he is not entirely blind to the world around him. In a stunning tour de force of descriptive prose, Joe flies across the land in a tiny helicopter, a Dragonfly, whose swooping and skimming flight over lakes and Canal and hills and white-sailed boats gives Joe "a sense of the eternity of it all...". For her part, Ailsa is drawn to the bustle and intense sensuality of the souks and suburbs of the local town of Ismailia. But, among the excitement of the exotic and the freedom she feels, the reality of empire is brought sickeningly before her when a boy in the street shouts "Death to the British" at her, and is savagely beaten and dragged away by two British Military Policemen. In the suburbs she befriends Mona, a Palestinian Arab and concert pianist who is married to an English (and Jewish) Wing Commander. Joe, as a sergeant, cannot and does not wish to fraternise with officers. He is repelled by the bohemian and intellectual world of Mona and her husband. But Ailsa and Mona draw closer and closer together, visiting the Luxor tombs, and a Palestinian refugee camp. Joe becomes convinced that Ailsa is being seduced away from him, perhaps physically; he suspects her of sleeping with Mona's husband. In his rage he tells Ailsa that she and Nia must return to England. Realising her lack of power, Ailsa wonders how to prepare "for a lifetime of such dullness" back home. Then, before she can go, the Egyptian revolution breaks out and their world explodes into violence and hatred.

It is in this grasp of place and time and the sense of these forces working on Joe and Ailsa to pull them apart that the strength of the novel lies. Joe, on the face of it the least sympathetic character, is in fact absorbing and complex. Uneducated, socially insecure, he is far from being a simpleton. He is moved by Mona's playing - and disgusted by the sensuality and over emotion of an Arab singer. The marriage of Joe and Ailsa is most movingly described - I have seldom read before such a deeply realised portrayal of marriage and young parenthood. There is a sexual bond between the two which veers on the edge of violence; Joe's irrational masculine jealousy in fact leads directly to the shattering climax of the book. The last meeting of Joe and Ailsa is both a moving reconciliation and an almost unbearably tragic parting.

There are many other pleasures in this book - the characters of Mona and her husband, the utterly convincing settings of 1950s Egypt, whether in Army quarters or at the Luxor tombs - but its real value is as a deeply felt novel that manages to combine in a masterly synthesis political history and the way that it moulds and warps the lives of human beings.