This novel tells the story of a twelve-year-old refugee, Nour, as her family flees war-torn Syria in 2011, while she tells and finds strength in the story of Rawiya, a girl crossing the same territory with a renowned map-maker in the twelfth century; for safety, both girls disguise themselves as boys while travelling. Like the main character, the author is American with a Syrian mother, but the book isn’t based on her own experiences.
Nour was born in the US, and her family lived in New York, but work was short and money was tight, so after the death of her father they move to the city of Homs, in western Syria, where her mother was born. Nour didn’t want to leave New York, nor did her sisters Huda and Zahra. They were particularly worried about the protests taking place in Dara’a, but their mother is sure that things will calm down. As it is, they have only been there for a few months when the Syrian civil war begins.
At first, the noise of bombing is distant, happening elsewhere, like lightning – “as long as it’s far away, you aren’t afraid of getting struck” – and even then their mother ignores advice to leave. But one day the bombs hit their street, and every house, including theirs, is flattened. Luckily everyone in Nour’s family survives, though her sister Huda is badly wounded. They travel from Syria to Jordan, then from Jordan to Egypt, facing disaster at every turn, reliant on the kindness of others who are often in equal distress.
The story Nour tells herself is one her late father told her every night, about Rawiya, who runs away from home and dresses as a boy to travel with a famous mapmaker: Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived from about 1100 to 1165. His patron is King Roger the Second of Palermo, for whom he intends to create “a more complete map than has ever existed before”. That will take them on a journey around Asia Minor, to the lands of Anatolia, Bilad ash-Sham, and the eastern Maghreb, and into encounters with the Fatimids and Crusaders of history, as well as the rocs, serpents and capricious caliphs of the Arabian Nights.
The book has a very regular structure, each chapter beginning with the adventures of Rawiya and Al-Idrisi then, after a cliffhanger, shifting to Nour and her family. The risk of such a structure is that the reader engages much more with one and comes to begrudge the other. In this case, although I would happily have read much more of the fantastical twelfth-century story, the contemporary story was also gripping, and both were equally emotional.
Nour’s synaesthesia does give the present-day story a bit of a fantasy feel (Huda’s laugh is pink-and-purple; a car’s tyres make a grey hiss; a bomb is a dark-brown boom; an ambulance’s siren is a pinky-red spiral), as well as creating a distancing effect that forces us to peer beyond her perceptions and thus be hit with events ourselves. Also, the family’s prayer rug, saved from their destroyed home in Homs, almost acts as a magic carpet, with them for the whole journey.
When the family gets to lie down on it, even in the worst of circumstances, like camping out behind a ferry depot, waiting to sneak on to a boat, and listening to machine gun fire in the night, you feel so happy for them getting that moment of rest. It reminded me of a favourite quote from Brian Aldiss: “Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.”
I don’t think it will be of quite as much interest to fantasy readers as John Barth’s similarly double-stranded Arabian adventure, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, but it’s still a very good book, and an important, eye-opening one too, for how successfully it creates empathy for refugees, using its fictional examples to encourage us to think of, as Nour says, “so many families in the world with no place to go, so many people tired of hurting but with no place to sleep”.
As I write this [2018], there have just been airstrikes on Damascus and Homs by France, the UK and the US, a response to the apparent use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. It must be dismaying for the author that her book remains so topical as its release date approaches. As Rawiya says bitterly after a calamity in medieval Palermo, “Those caught in between are the ones who get hurt.” Stephen Theaker ****
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