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STOLEN (Arrow £5.99)
This novel was also scripted, by me, as a TV drama.
In fact I can’t remember which came first, TV or book.
Like “To Have and To Hold” it tackles another
hard-hitting, controversial subject –in this case, child
abduction. This topic hit the news, around this time, and
in fact the TV drama did a lot to bring these casess to public
notice, with questions asked in Parliament and an eventual
change in the law. I wanted to write about a father stealing
his children and taking them back to his country (in this
case Pakistan, as I could write about the place), but I didn’t
want to paint him as a villian. This would seem racist and
unfair. I also believe that if a novel makes us dismiss somebody
as evil, without us understanding them, then it’s not
done its job of enlarging our understanding (with “Porky”
this was difficult, but I tried). So I gave Salim a very good
reason for taking his children home to his own country –
his wife was feckless and faithless, England is increasingly
brutish and so on. It helped, with the TV drama, that Salim
was played by the wonderful Art Malik.
Always a rebel, Marianne was the first girl in her class
to bleach her hair and learn how to smoke. A few boyfriends
and one abortion later she falls in love with Salim, the proud
and elegant Pakistani with eyes like treacle. East meets West
in a passionate mixed marriage. However, Marianne knows little
of the Islamic view of motherhood. When his wife proves unfaithful,
Salim reasons that she is morally incapable of bringing up
her children and kidnaps them while she is at work.
“Deborah Moggach captures brilliantly the basic incompatabilities
and misunderstandings that arise when two people have little
knowledge of each other’s culture….both funny
and moving.”
(Sunday Express)
“The novel assumes the tension of detective fiction…the
mother-child detail is all painfully right. This is a nicely
balanced account of marital breakdown in peculiarly difficult
circumstances.”
(Sunday Times)
320 pages (6 June, 1991)
Publisher: Arrow; ISBN: 0749309741
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