The
late George Alec Effinger firmly placed himself in North Africa with the
trilogy of cyberpunk mysteries which focused on Audran Marid.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood has set forth his own claim to the same region
in Pashazade, the first of a trilogy set in an amorphous twenty-first
century.
Grimwood
focuses his attention on Ashraf el-Mansur, a man convicted of a murder he
doesn't remember committing, now a fugitive after escaping from a Seattle
prison. His escape aided by a mysterious benefactor, he finds himself
in El Iskandryia, the city in which his family lives. In El Iskandryia,
Ashraf discovers he has had a marriage arranged to Zara, the daughter of a
social-climbing oilman.
Even
as Ashraf is getting adjusted to his situation, which he finds repellant,
his aunt, Nafisa, is found murdered and official suspicion points in his
direction. In the manner of such novels, Ashraf finds himself trying
to discover who murdered the woman and, incidentally, left him heir to the
entire fabulous estate. While Pashazade could easily have
become a detective novel or a mystery procedural, Grimwood manages to rise
above those standards and makes Pashazade and examination of Ashraf's
own life.
When
the novel begins, Grimwood only hints at Ashraf's past, and it is not even
clear that he is aware of his entire past. Throughout his
investigation, he is reminded of different aspects of his own past with the
hindsight than maturity brings to him. This is especially true when he
looks at Hani, his nine-year old niece who was left orphaned and neglected
following Nafisa's murder. In her, he finds the goal of ensuring that
she doesn't follow the same path he did as a child.
Ashraf’s struggle to come to terms with his own life is what moves
the story.
Nominally an alternate history, Grimwood seems less
concerned with the world he has built than the characters.
While this creates a strongly character driven novel, it puts them
into a sort of hazy world which never quite materializes. By making
his world an alternate history, however, Grimwood is specifically drawing
the reader's attention to his shadowy world. Being the first book in a
trilogy, this twenty-first century Islamic-centric world may be better
fleshed out in future volumes, but it is a glaring weakness in Pashazade
which calls attention to itself.
As Effinger included elements of cyberpunk into the
Budayeen, so, too, does Grimwood incorporate cyberpunk into El Iskandryia.
While Effinger used cyberpunk almost for a humorous effect, Grimwood
employs it in earnest as yet another hurdle Ashraf must overcome. The
exact rationale behind Ashraf's enhancement, called the fox, is never made
clear in Pashazade, again, something Grimwood may be leaving for
explanation in future novels in the trilogy. However, within the
context of this book, it leaves the reader more confused than
intrigued.
While Pashazade is not a perfect novel, Grimwood manages to bring
a reality to his characters as their past and personalities are revealed to
the reader over the course of the novel. While Pashazade does
feel complete in and of itself, it does whet the reader's appetite for
future expansion of the ideas in subsequent books in the trilogy.
