HOT WATER MAN (Arrow £5.99)
Five years after I returned home from Karachi I wrote
a novel that was set there. Maybe it takes that long for experiences
to be absorbed and reassembled into fiction. I loosely based
one of the characters on myself, an English woman who rebels
against the ex-pat community in Pakistan and lands in trouble.
This novel, however, has a large ensemble cast consisting
of Pakistanis, Brits, Americans. And a holy man. I wanted
to explore the culture clash between Islam and the West, run
with it and have some fun with it, and drew on my memories
of living there.
Karachi, 1975. From London comes Christine and Donald Manley:
Christine, an emergent feminist, is resolving not to play
the memsahib and trying – unsuccessfully – to
become pregnant; Donald works for a chemical company selling
the Pill, disapproves of his wife’s behaviour and recalls
fondly his grandfather’s tales of the Raj. From Wichita
comes Duke Hanson, who thinks string-pulling and adultery
un-American. That is, until he meets Shamime…Hot Water
Man is a highly entertaining novel in which the characters’
preconceptions are ruthlessly challenged as they swelter under
the unfamiliar heat of an alient sun.
“Wincingly funny…a tragi-comedy of manners and
errors….Ms Moggach has lived there, and it shows. She’s
sound on the heat, squalor and frustrations, the feel and
pulse of a place where Europeans can’t really go native
sinced so many natives have half-taken to European ways. It’s
an ambitious book showing Asia through British and American
eyes; compassionate, yet never sloppy, it notes the flaws
and frailties of East and West without mockery.”
(Daily Mail)
“Remarkably good: original, perceptive and very entertaining.”
(Alison Lurie)
"Entertaining, subtle and intelligent."
(Sunday Telegraph)
256 pages (1 November, 1983)
Publisher: Penguin Books; ISBN: 0140063307
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