When I describe books written by Mary Stewart, it is usually as a guidebook with mystery, or as an entry to local people and customs. With this book, it is pure nostalgia for a time when the Middle East could still be visited without being blown up by anyone and sundry's drones or bombs. If you want to know what the USA, United Kingdom, Russia, and China have done to the world, compare the descriptions of the author with today's reality.
The heroine and her cousin meet by chance in Beirut and decide to visit their aunt living in a palace in the Adonis Valley. The aunt is an eccentric of the old school. She moved to the palace years ago, cut off her family, and donned male Arab garb to lead a life of freedom and adventure where and how she chose. The visit therefore will be a surprise and probably highly unwelcome, both.
The plot opens up all kinds of opportunities to wreak havoc with readers' imagination and more so with the heroines. The tale becomes quite dark once the heroine is inside the crumbling pile called a palace. Nothing seems to fit or to make much sense; people are strange and become stranger as the arid landscape around the palace becomes more ominous.
Cleverly, the story of the heroine and her cousin gives a second strand that is equally disturbing. The interaction of the two cousins and with the other people becomes as tangled as the story of the old lady. To keep it all straight is at times a real effort and well worth the reading of this clever plot. It is quite hard to give the proper feel of the book without including a spoiler. But I return often to reading this book for its feel of 1001 nights.
Mary Stewart's The Gabriel Hounds was out of print for many years. It is available on Kindle by Amazon. Where her other novels can still be traced in today's world, this one has become a historical record of what the Middle East used to be like before being bombed to smithereens by the world's superpowers. It's an excursion into a lost world well worth the while.
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