The monarchy isn’t a person or a group of people. It’s a system, like a dragon that knows neither friends nor enemies, which a large belly that is never satisfied, never full.
Rating: 1/5
Trigger Warnings: war
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
So I don’t have a lot to say on this book. A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me just sort of happened. I picked it up at a charity shop, intrigued by the name more than the blurb, but interested to read something on a subject I’d never tried before. Set in 1980s Morocco and focusing on war in the Sahara, as well as life as the King’s jester, I really thought it would teach me something new, even if I wasn’t going to love it.
I was disappointed. In fact, even saying that is giving too much emotion to what I felt about this book. I read it, the events played out, the characters fleshed out, but I felt nothing.
Being a translation make it harder to critique the writing as no matter how well translated it is, words will never have exactly the same meaning as when they are written in the original language. That being said, the writing was difficult to get into at first, swapping between Hassan and his father as narrators without any real signal of the change was a little off-putting but it usually only takes a sentence to realise which character is talking.
The following problem, however, is that I didn’t really care which character was talking. Hassan was interesting when he was at war but then each friend disappears in a different way - yes, a valid result of war, but the war coverage made little to no sense and I felt lost whenever he spoke about his missions - and then he heads home to find his wife is now in some three-way marriage and the face of a new political campaign. And then he attends his own funeral? I was just so confused about what happened at the end of his story, and I didn’t care to go back and figure it out either.
Balloute was an all round dislikable character who had…well, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He tried to kill a man by buying him a prostitute with syphilis, just because he wanted to be the only court jester. Was I meant to then feel sorry for him when he mysteriously lost his job and wife and, eventually, life? His sanity might have gone towards the end as well because I couldn’t understand a lot of what he was planning by the end.
On top of the very strange plot was the realisation that this all takes place over 11 days. That just wasn’t necessary and didn’t add anything. No sense of urgency, no implication that things change suddenly (which I think may have been the point but because of the back and forth between past and present all the time, it just did not come across), and no real effort to cement that it was just 11 days other than the chapter titles.
I just can’t find much positive to say about this book other than it occasionally had nice writing - but even then I really mean the ‘occasionally’.
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