The Lord by Soraya Antonius

But the countryside informers, who regularly sent in reports of all events, ordianry or not, mentioned that he was a most remarkable conjuror. Instead of pulling silk block-stamped scarves out of his sleeves and giving one of them to the girl who was due to be married during the feast and later selling the rest, or eggs out of his nostrils, or baby quails out his ears, he walked through walls of houses, "where there's no door," added a report painstakingly. Some brushwood blaze got out of hand in one village and threatened the mounds of unthreshed and as yet unallotted wheat: he had put it out in a flash, from a long way away, without buckets of water. He had told it to go out.

A journalist in Israel makes the acquaintance of an old British emigre named Miss Alice, who has been in the country since it was known as Mandatory Palestine. Miss Alice has a story that is of interest to the journalist, one of time before the creation of the state of Israel, when tensions between Jews, Arabs, and their British overlords ran particularly high. This story concerns a man named Tareq, who once was a pupil of Miss Alice's, a charming but mediocre student who disappears and reemerges as a traveling conjuror--the equivalent of a children's magician. As a magician, Tareq is without equal, able to do more than simple parlor tricks, changing water into wine and British homburgs into highly symbolic keffiyehs. Tareq's act catches the attention of a British police chief named Challis, who suspects the magician of sedition, and who, on top of everything else, has a pure personal dislike of him. Challis makes the capture and execution of Tareq his obsession, bordering on mania.

Many questions surround the circumstances described in Soraya Antonius' The Lord. One is: what kind of magician is Tareq, really? Is he simply a very talented charlatan, or is he actually capable of a kind of sorcery? When one of the book's secondary characters, a British journalist named Egerton, is injured in the middle of the wilderness on a trip through Galilee, Tareq's sudden appearance is mystical and startling enough that we are ready to believe that he is the real deal. Other questions branch off of this one: how subversive is Tareq's act, really? There is a certain slyness to it, certainly, but there's a big difference between the symbolism of the transforming accessories and stoking the Arab resistance to British rule, as Challis suspects Tareq is doing. If Tareq is only a magician, Challis' enmity is another open question--why does he hate the guy so much? Antonius' narrator-journalist, interpolating Miss Alice's story, even suggests at one point that latent same-sex attraction (in this case, "buggery") is at the root of some British officials' enmity toward Arab men. But the irony of Challis' persecution of Tareq is that, if Tareq isn't a rebel leader, Challis seems intent on turning him into one, and the more he pursues him, the more Arab communities are caught in the crossfires of the man's mania, breeding resentment and rebellion.

I thought this was pretty good. There are parts of the book I couldn't quite follow: Tareq is brought within Challis' web by a convoluted chain of events that begins with Berthaina, a woman married to a much older widower who turns to Tareq's magic to help her have a child after a series of miscarriages, and for whom Tareq falls quietly. Berthaina's involvement with Tareq results in her house being destroyed, part of a British zeal for razing Palestinian houses, and roping in Tareq's mother, whose resentment at being forced to care for the now homeless woman ends up driving her into the arms of the British mandate. Or something like that. And I thought the B-story of a young Miss Alice's flirtation with a genteel British officer fell pretty flat.

But I also thought that The Lord captured in rich and fascinating detail a moment in history that has been obscured by succeeding events. Tareq's Palestine is a powderkeg waiting to blow, a very old and diverse country that is run indifferently by the British, whose priggishness and sense of birthright keeps them from understanding the people whose stewards they claim to be. As far as I can tell there are no named Jewish characters in The Lord, but it shows how the folly of empire sets up the Nakba to come, and how the British were using the destruction of homes as a means to suppress the Arab population long before the success of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. It's all the British Empire's fault, basically. But beyond this it's a gripping story of intrigue and resolve, and of people who refuse to give up their vitality and dignity to the powers who demand it as sacrifice.