6 November 1955
While "The Spider's House," like Paul Bowles' two previous novels, has North Africa as its setting, it is distinctly different in character from Mr. Bowles' earlier work. "The Sheltering Sky" and "Let It Come Down" were novels of extreme subjectivity pinpointed on the solitary drama of the Hollow Man--withdrawn from the events of his time, passive and purposeless--who somnambulistically drifted through a nightmarish cosmos toward inevitable disaster. In "The Spider's House" the main protagonists are not ciphers and they are caught up in contemporary realities--the conflict between the French and the Arabs in Morocco. This is a more promising orientation (for if fiction is to have life it must see something more in life than a dreamlike drift from nullity to nothingness); but its immediate results are rather disappointing. "The Spider's House," though admirable in parts, is in the final analysis a faltering and fuzzy performance.
The story focuses alternatively on an American novelist and on a 15-year-old Arab boy, whose lives become intertwined in the latter stages of the novel. John Stenham is an ex-Communist who has lived for several years in North Africa totally withdrawn into himself, and has come to find this life absurd and unreal. Now he is preoccupied by an indefinable anxiety which he describes to himself as a desire "to be saved." Stenham views the Moroccan conflict with a "plague-on- both-their-houses" attitude: he detests French colonialism and to him the aims and methods of the Istiqlal, the Nationalist party, are "fundamentally identical with those of Marxism-Leninism." What he would like is a continuance of the traditional Moslem way of life, and this he knows to be impossible.
The Arab boy, Amar, is the illiterate son of a healer. Brought up with a fanatical devotion to Islamic orthodoxy, he is horrified by the impious ways of the emancipated Nationalists, but passionately shares their hatred of the French. A third personage--a glamorous American divorcÈe rigidly entrenched in the clichÈs of doctrinaire liberalism--plays a supporting role in the story, which draws these three characters into the mounting political turmoil of Fez in 1954.
With its atmosphere of sinister tension, its scenes of nationalist conspiracy and French police action, of escape and pursuit in the Arab quarter, "The Spider's House" reads for stretches like a first-class political thriller. But the plot meanders all over the place, accumulating sound and fury and signifying precious little in terms of political ideas or anything else. The Arab boy acquires a veneration for Stenham; and the American glamour girl, after decisively repulsing Stenham's advances, abruptly changes her mind about him. What precisely causes all this, what grace resides in Stenham, was unclear to this reader. He remained, as far as I was concerned, a rather unimpressive type.
One aspect of "The Spider's House" is superlatively good--the vivid fidelity and richness of detail with which it re-creates the Arab scene. Mr. Bowles, to my mind, has filed to give his story coherence and point, but he has certainly made the explosive city of Fez come powerfully to life.
Mr. Rolo is a book reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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