The Spider's House (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Like Bowles, I have lived in Morocco, specifically Fez, where this story is set. It's many years since I read the book, but I have a very clear memory of how very good it is. Bowles shines in the obvious literary sense, but more startling is his knowledge of Moroccan matters, of Moroccan Arabic, of Islam, and so on. Even the reader is not in a position to judge these things, they do make their presence felt. This is not a superficial novel, and it is the reader's immersion in a very real place and a very different way of thinking and acting that lead to a sense of depth.

Only Bowles could write a book like this. He has the eye of an outsider but the knowledge of a local. And he has a fantastic narrative gift. We follow two characters in Fez during the violent independence of Morocco. One is an American writer living in a hotel and the other is a local boy. Through these eyes, we see two sides. But the clever thing about it is that these two sides are neither French colonial nor fundamentalist Islamic. This is a sad story of the destruction of culture and religion. It is a story of the struggle between true Islam and the Fundamentalists. It is a piece of history told by a witness Paul Bowles.

(4.5 stars) Eerily prescient in its depiction of Islamic populations wishing to establish sovereign Islamic governments and free themselves from tyranny in North Africa and the Middle East, this 1955 novel should have been a wake-up call to the western world half a century ago when it was written. Paul Bowles (1910 - 1999), an American expatriate author, was an eyewitness to the uprisings which occurred in Morocco in 1954 after the French deposed the much-loved Sultan Mohammed V. The tumult that developed in Fez and the many factions that evolved within the local population will strike a familiar chord among contemporary readers who are now seeing the same issues being addressed by residents of many other countries in the region, with the same kind of attendant violence provoking the same perplexity among western powers.

When John Stenham, an American author in his late thirties, an old hand in Morocco, leaves the home of a friend in Fez, his friend insists that he take a protector along with him that night as he travels back home to the Medina. No sooner does he arrive back at the hotel where he lives, however, than he receives a phone call from Alain Moss, also living at the hotel, who must see him immediately. It is 1:20 a.m. The focus of the novel then shifts abruptly to that of Amar, a fourteen-year-old boy brought up in a poor, strictly traditional Moslem household. As Amar, a naïf, moves around the city, unimpeded, talking to his boss, his family, and his young friends, the reader discovers through his eyes the many factions at work in this fraught time in Moroccan history.

His father, like many others, wants the Sultan back on the throne and hints at promoting jihad against unbelievers. The brother of a friend, arrested for bringing grenades into Fez from Spanish Morocco, is a member of Istiklal (meaning "Freedom"), a group of young men who plan oust the French and all other foreigners by violence. A group of young intellectuals has entered the country to promote Marxist/Leninist ideals, and the French themselves have enlisted groups of Berbers to undermine the effects of the jihadists. The Mokhazni, a group of Arab locals who work with the French, spy on their own people, and uphold French values.

In Part II, the author reintroduces Stenham and Moss, and also introduces Mme. Veyron, the former Polly Burroughs, an adventure-seeking American who has escaped her French husband to travel abroad. She and Stenham connect, and it is their "adventures" which broaden the picture of what is happening in Fez and the immediate surroundings, though it is their inevitable connection with the more appealing character of Amar that gives the full picture. Stenham and Polly Burroughs are flat characters and do not come alive anywhere nearly as much as Amar, but the overall depiction of life in Morocco is compelling. Many philosophical digressions serve to explain some of the mysteries of Islam for western readers. And when Amar prays to Allah that Allah "might help them discover new refinements in the matter of causing pain and despair, might show them the way to the imposing of hitherto undreamed of humiliation," the reader begins to understand some of the current issues there, and in other parts of that area. A novel to fascinate anyone interested in the current issues rending North Africa and the Middle East, The Spider's Web is an especially enlightening novel. Mary Whipple