We are a small home group of 7 to 8 members who have been meeting for a number of years.  A few people have come and gone, but the core group has been very stable.  We meet at Jackie's home on the third Tuesday of the month at lunchtime and bring a sandwich and a book!  It's all very friendly.
We all contribute to the choice of books we read and the range is wide - from fiction to history, biographies to diaries.  As well as our book of the month, we share news on other books that members have been reading. Jackie takes notes and produces a monthly resume of our discussion on our current book, and of the other reading that we have done.  We will be posting some of those resumes here from time to time.  Another member maintains a list of our reading, so that we can look back on more than 12 years of books that we have read.

Notes from book group 21.1.25

Present:  Karen, Jane, Irene, Steve, Jackie

Apologies: Carol

Book of the month:

The Muslim Cowboy by Bruce Omar Yates

The unnamed protagonist of The Muslim Cowboy, known only as ‘The American’, lives in a fantasy world peppered with references to famous Westerns like ‘Shane’.  He derives his simple moral code from these tales of the American West and roams a war-torn Iraqi landscape on his trusty camel, Hosti, who, like the wonder horses of TV cowboy superheroes is both a steed and a friend.  The American dresses in double denim, a cowboy hat and boots, listens to country music on a cd player, drinks coca cola, smokes a vape and watches DVDs of his favourite Western films on repeat.  This is his life.

Like all the celluloid heroes of the old West he is a loner, in flight from traumatic memories – memories that we, the readers, never get to share. He avoids all human contact and any confrontation, and stays away from the city,  inside the desert.  But one day his narrow, self-sufficient life is interrupted when he comes across a ghost town, abandoned by its inhabitants, where he encounters a 10 year old orphan girl, Nadia.  He feels  a compassion that he doesn’t want to admit to and becomes her self-appointed rescuer. They travel together whilst he seeks a means of ensuring her future safety and security. 

His first plan, to leave her with a bereaved father that he knows, is thwarted when she turns out to be the wrong kind of Muslim and is rejected by this friend. 

His second plan, to put her on to a train that will take her to safety in Jordan,  a land not at war with itself, leads them into danger and the book mutates into a type of adventure story familiar from US cinema, in which a damaged and inadequate central character finds the courage to confront danger in order to rescue a vulnerable friend.  It introduces tropes from the old silent movies, such as the hero being tied to a railway track (and rescued by Hosti from an oncoming train at the very last minute); and the hero and victim combining to overcome evil perpetrators.

The ending is ambiguous, with Nadia throwing in her lot with a powerful warlord who is a member of her own sect, and The American wandering away to nowhere in particular.

The Muslim Cowboy had such an interesting premise that it came as a great disappointment that the work did not live up to its hype.  It had been described as ‘extraordinary and mesmerising’, and billed as a daring debut from a young Anglo Indian author.  It has caused quite a stir in literary circles. 

But, whilst acknowledging its originality, we were unconvinced by the execution.  We found the fantasy style of the prose overblown and wordy, the grammar and use of English poor, as if it had been written by a non-native language speaker who hadn’t quite grasped some of the rules and idioms, and  had an imprecise vocabulary (eg:- using the word  motorcade instead of convoy, when describing a caravan of military vehicles ).  It came as no surprise to learn that Bruce Omar Yates grew up in the South of France and didn’t come to England until he went to university.

Whilst acknowledging that this was not a novel in the realistic tradition, and should not be held to those standards, we nevertheless found it to have a frustrating lack of character development or depiction of inner worlds.  Hosti chewing through the American’s bindings at the railway track to free him seemed to us to reduce to adolescent humour the tension of what had been depicted up until then as a fraught and dangerous episode.  This was rather typical of the uneven tone throughout the book.  It came across as an inexperienced author lacking control over his material.

One member also  commented that it seemed that the young male writer knew little about pre-pubescent females and had little concept of the dangers that might surround them.  The American planned to leave Nadia with an adult male friend, a complete stranger, whose rejection of her based upon her religious affiliation only underpinned the risks that would have been run in leaving her there.   His subsequent plan, to put her alone on a train to a safe country, destination unknown, was equally irresponsible. Although the tone of the novel is somewhat childlike and pre-sexual, even within the conventions of a fantasy story it felt very disturbing and wrong  that Nadia ended up disappearing with an adult male stranger .  It was as if the author had just run out of ideas about how to end the odyssey.  There was for us something cold hearted and superficial about the whole thing.

The group did consider the possibility that the tortured grammar and poor compositional skills were not the result of being a second language speaker trying to write in English.  We wondered instead whether an attempt was being made to portray the after effect of severe trauma – the dislocation, the  blankness and the dreamlike unreality of having seen dreadful sights and had awful experiences in the war zone.

Whilst for us the book was unsuccessful, offering – we felt- little insight into Muslim culture, we did acknowledge that it vividly depicted the mess that was left in Iraq after the withdrawal of the Allied troops.  And it did make the point that Iraq had been a mess even before the war, so was even-handed in its approach.  We could see that the book was inventive and unusual, with an original approach to its subject and it will be interesting to see what this writer comes up with next.  But overall we were rather disappointed.

Planning

This year’s books

We discussed books for this year:

Feb: In Memoriam / Alice Winn

Mar: August Blue / Deborah Levy

Apr: The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

May: Lady Tan’s Circle of Women / Lisa See

June: The Black Lock / Peter May

July: Bleak House / Charles Dickens

Aug: In My Time of Dying / Sebastien Junger

Chawton Trip to see Jane Austen’s cottage

Agreed date of Sunday June 15^th.

 Irene to see if John actively wants to come (as opposed to being helpful by providing a second car).   If not we can manage in Jackie’s car as Jane’s not coming

Books We Have Read

Karen

Street Lawyer / John Grisham – good.

The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald

Steve

The Siege of Loyalty House / Jessie Childs. 

A minutely-researched,kaleidoscopic look at the siege of a royalist stronghold during the civil war.  Steve was struck by how few of the participants actively wanted to be fighting

Line of Beauty / Alex Hollinghurst

Set in the Thatcherite era and follows the fortunes of an ambitious young gay politician. Cynical expose of ruthless politicking

Perfect / Rachel Joyce

Looks at how similar upbringing and circumstances can yet dictate very different paths in life.

Irene

Has now read and enjoyed 4 of the D S George Cross novels by Tim Sullivan

One August Night / Victoria Hislop

Not her best

Jane

After The Funeral / Tessa Hadley

A set of short stories

The House of Fortune / Jessie Burton

Follow up to The Miniaturist and Jane thought it even better

James / Percival Everett

A follow up to Huckleberry Finn

Jackie

Holding / Graham Norton

Set in rural Southern Ireland.  An overweight village Garda interacts with locals following the discovery of a skeleton on a local farm.  Warm, humorous and perceptive.  He is talented.

I, Richard Plantagenet / J P Reedman

Set during Richard III’s teenage years, when he accompanied his brother Edward IV into exile in Flanders

Nothing To Fear / Julie McFadden

An experienced American hospice nurse talking about death

Origins / Lewis Dartnell

How the geological and climatic evolution of the earth interacted with the development of the human race.

The John Rawlings Historical Mysteries 1 & 2 of a set / Deryn Lake

Murder mysteries set in Georgian London, centred around John Fielding, blind brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, and London’s first magistrate.   Brings vividly to life aspects of 18^th century London – fashionable Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, the theatres, gambling dens, brothels and great houses.

Next meeting

19.02.25.  In Memoriam by Alice Winn