Barbara Hodgson, The Lives of Shadows (Chronicle Books, 2004)
The story of how I found this book is almost as fantastic as the book itself! It all began when I was reading Frederick Highland's excellent murder mystery Night Falls on Damascus. As I noted in that review, Highland does a splendid job of presenting the city of Damascus in all its crumbling magnificence and of giving an on-the-scene impression of the French bombing raid that took place there in the fall of 1925.
Shortly after I finished Night Falls on Damascus, I ran across an article in a back issue of Cornucopia magazine featuring a book titled Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City. I could tell at once from the text and photos in the article that the entire book was worth having, so I ordered a copy and treated myself to looking at it over the course of a few evenings. The author of that book, Brigid Keenan, spent time in the city in the early 1990s when her husband served in a diplomatic posting there. She became enamored of the old houses with their courtyards and fountains and decorative tilework. Between these two books, I became, if not enamored, at the very least intrigued, and spent some time searching the Amazon database for other books about this venerable city.
That's how I found out about The Lives of Shadows. We requested and received a review copy from the publisher right away. And what a pleasure it was to read! It was at least as enjoyable, albeit in an entirely different way, as the two books that led me to it! How to describe it? Well, it's definitely an historical novel. All of the action takes place between 1914 and 1945. And it's a novel of place. Most of the action takes place in the city of Damascus. Without revealing too much about its more numinous qualities, I think I would venture to say that it's also a novel about the way love can conquer physical death. And I don't necessarily refer to love of a person . . . although that's part of the story, too.
The Lives of Shadows is subtitled "An Illustrated Novel," and that it certainly is, although not quite in the way one usually thinks of an illustrated novel. The illustrations don't directly portray characters or scenes from the story. Some of them are newspaper clippings that provide background on relevant historical events, like the aforementioned uprising and another French bombardment that took place about twenty years later, at the end of World War II. Some are postcards or photographs of places in the city. There's a very official-looking identity card for one of the characters and a similar document giving him title to the piece of property that is central to the story. There are several rather nice drawings of floor plans, architectural details, and ornamentation particular to this building -- including one that folds out from the page. Then there are the pages of hand-written Arabic text, even, in some places, Arabic marginalia on pages otherwise set with regular English type. These pages are sometimes also strewn with pressed leaves or flower petals (or least, photographic representations of same). A couple of pages also feature translucent overlays, printed to look like overlays were drawn on them with pencil.
The physical book itself is remarkable in its appearance. It's relatively small, measuring just 6 inches wide by 8 inches high. Even with all the artwork, it's just 185 pages long-as I recall, I finished reading it in about four hours over two evenings. The text is printed on heavy coated stock. Many of the pages are tinted light tan, as though they have aged in a dry place. The pages are stitched to the binding. You can literally see the white thread in the folds. So the book as an artifact becomes as much a part of the story as the text itself.
Are you beginning to see why I found this book so utterly fascinating? And I haven't even told you about the story yet! It's about an Englishman named Julian Beaufort, who travels to the Levant (the Eastern Mediterranean) on a version of the Grand Tour after he completes his engineering degree in 1914. He finds himself completely at home in Damascus, with its narrow streets and alluring homes. "Disguised outwardly as humble wattle-and-daub tenements," he writes, "they revealed their sumptuous interiors reluctantly." He rents a room in one such house, spends time with the owner, a scribe who knows a great deal about the history of the ancient building (called Bait Katib, or House of the Katib family). In a relatively short time, he makes arrangements to purchase the property from the family, whose only daughter is about to leave for her new husband's house.
Julian has to return to London to obtain the funds necessary to complete the transaction. While he is there, World War I breaks out. He enters military service, is injured in a bombing raid, and takes a long while to recover from the resulting shrapnel wounds. Thus he doesn't return to claim his ownership and move in to Bait Katib until October 1925. He arrives in the middle of the French bombardment of the city. An old porter, Ahmed, accompanies him to the house from the railway station. The previous owners of Bait Katib are long since dead. One old servant, Najwa, guards the house. She explains that the Katib's daughter, Asilah, has returned to the house following the death of her husband Tariq at the hands of the French.
For the next twenty years, until a distant relative of the Katib family arrives to challenge his right of ownership, Julian lives in and cares for the house. Ahmed and Najwa remain with him at the house until each of them dies. Julian senses Asilah's presence in the house, but doesn't actually encounter her, except in his dreams. Mind you, parts of the book are written in Asilah's hand -- it is she who pens the Arabic pages at the end of Julian's journal, who leaves the flower petals on the pages he's been writing on and gold coins to help him pay for the services of a lawyer, who leads him into parts of the house that appear as they did centuries before. . . . I can't possibly tell you any more than that! But now do you see why I find this book so fascinating? I can't recommend it any more passionately than that!
According to the biosketch on the back flap of the dustjacket, Barbara Hodgson lives in Vancouver, BC. She has written three other illustrated novels. David Kidney has reviewed one of them, Hippolyte's Island. Someday I must track them down. Right now I am still basking in the wonder of The Lives of Shadows.
