Pashazade: The First Arabesk
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Simon & Schuster Earthlight, 326 pages
Grimwood's fifth novel (first of a projected trilogy) is a SF/mystery hybrid set in an alternate world in which
Germany won the First World War, and the Ottoman Empire never collapsed. Egypt is an autonomous province of the
Empire; on its Mediterranean shore sits the free city of El Iskandryia, where sybaritic luxury rubs shoulders with
desperate poverty, and the strict, ancient codes of Islam coexist uneasily with the decadent excesses of the modern
world.
Ashraf el-Mansur, also known as Zee-Zee, is a young man with a troubled past. He's on the run from a Seattle prison,
in an escape engineered by his aunt, Lady Nafisa, whom he's never met. Arriving in El Iskandryia, Ashraf--who till
now hasn't even known his father's name--discovers to his shock that he's the legitimate son of the Emir of Tunis,
and therefore entitled to the high rank of Bey under Ottoman law. That's not all: a marriage has been brokered
for him, to the daughter of a fabulously wealthy industrialist--a young woman he dislikes almost on sight.
But before Ashraf can really take stock of his new situation, Lady Nafisa is murdered. Ashraf finds himself the
sole inheritor of his aunt's estate, responsible for the welfare of his nine-year-old niece, Hani. He's also a
suspect in Lady Nafisa's killing. To save himself (and Hani), he must turn detective, and go looking for the truth
in a city he doesn't know and a culture he doesn't understand, where secrets run very deep and very little is what
it seems.
As with many mysteries, the suspense in Pashazade doesn't really lie in the solution to the murder--which
actually isn't tremendously interesting, once it arrives--but in the personal journey the murder investigation
forces Ashraf to make. The challenge of finding his aunt's killers and clearing his name is only part of a larger
struggle to unravel the secrets of his unexpected heritage and come to terms with his history. In Hani, unloved
and neglected, he sees the ghost of his own unhappy childhood; Hani can be rescued, as he himself never was, but
to do that he must find the strength, for the first time in his life, to take responsibility for a human being
other than himself. It's a convincing portrait of a man shaking off the demons of his past and becoming, finally,
the person he was meant to be.
The cyberpunk elements that have been such a strong feature of Grimwood's previous fiction are downplayed in Pashazade.
There are the obligatory references to nanotech, smart guns, cybernetic enhancements and the like, but for the
most part Grimwood's vividly-evoked, near-future El Iskandryia feels timeless, a place whose ancient core the jittery
innovations of the modern world can't touch. The city, Grimwood tells us, is "built on the rubble of its own
history"; this persistence of the old beneath the façade of the new is a recurring theme throughout
the book, and something Ashraf frequently runs foul of in his search for answers.
Not everything adds up. Some of the cyberpunkisms seem imperfectly worked-out--Ashraf's cybergenetic enhancements,
for instance, including a piece of self-diagnostic hardware that manifests itself, or which Ashraf has personified
as, an Arctic fox. While it's clear that the hardware/fox is part of the baggage Ashraf must discard in his struggle
to find himself, the whys and hows of the hardware/fox itself--which include a real fox somewhere in Ashraf's past--are
never fully explained. The timeline is also confusing; at one point it seems we must be well into the twenty-first
century, but at another we don't seem much beyond 2000, an impression furthered by the fact that so many things,
from stores to computer programs to brand names, seem entirely unchanged from the real-world present day. I don't
find it totally plausible that in a world with nanotech, people would still be running Linux and shopping at Walmart--or
that in an alternate world, these things would have developed in just the same way. But the alternate history aspect
of the book is also pretty vague--so while things don't quite connect, they don't actively contradict, either.
Caveats aside, Pashazade is a well-crafted and absorbing novel, and a welcome step forward for Grimwood
into a more thoughtful, less frenetic style.
Copyright © 2001 Victoria Strauss
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