The body, that of a naked woman, is discovered in an alley known as the Lane

of Many Heads. It’s the alley itself that narrates the story, introducing the
main characters and commenting on their lives.

Nobody wants to claim the woman, because of her nakedness, because of the
shame it would bring to whichever family she came from. Detective Nasser is
determined to find out who she is, though, because he is haunted by the killing
of his sister by their father, because his father killed his sister out of shame.

This is present day Mecca, a place both ancient and modern. A holy city like
other holy cities, full of pilgrims, beggars, the exploited and those who exploit.
Women exist with the permission of men, are invisible until men notice them,
as someone to desire, someone to use, someone to condemn. But women also
exist without the permission of men. They have desires and ways of using
others to obtain what they want. Sometimes the veil between men and women
is useful to them.

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The Dove’s Necklace is a confusion of different voices. It marries noir-like

narrative delivered by the alley with extracts from the diary of a local writer,
Yusuf, who was obsessed with one of the women Detective Nasser believes the
body could be, and with emails written to her German boyfriend by the other
woman Detective Nasser is considering as the victim. The rhythms of the diary
extracts are like poetry. The prose feels open, as though it’s floating, rather
than nailed down. It has a dreamlike feel. The emails, too, since they are love
letters and outpourings of a woman’s secret heart, are also poetic and open.
The narrative delivered by the alley has a touch of magical realism mixed in
with the hard boiled noir. Alem’s writing made me think of Auster, both
Murakamis, Atwood, Bolaño, Eco, Mankell, Borges, lots of mostly male writers
whose work I love. It is writing that has internal contradictions. It’s clipped
and concise, but it meanders and doesn’t reveal much that could be called
concrete. Landscape is a character, but inert objects have the aspect of
characters, too. There is symbolism that I didn’t always follow, and I don’t
know if that was because I’m unfamiliar with Islam, or unfamiliar with Saudi
society and culture, or whether the symbolism was just plain old obscure. I felt
very white and western as I read. One thread that pulled me through
the obfuscation of the book was the way in which Detective Nasser as a
character was like almost every detective ever written: lonely,
sexually frustrated, middle aged, worried about his reputation, carrying
around his Madonna/whore complex in his wish to protect women in their
weakness while hating them for their lack of need for protection. Detective
Nasser was the most familiar thing in the book. He was also mind blowingly
incompetent in the way he conducts the investigation.
Added to my poor understanding of Saudi society and culture,
my unfamiliarity with Mecca and the way of life in that city made the book
a voyage of discovery for me. I imagined Mecca to be a place of winding lanes
and pale stone buildings, quite ancient in appearance, from the descriptions
given by the Lane of Many Heads. At first, I didn’t get a sense of
modernisation. I imagined the scenes around the Sanctuary to be like those
seen on travel programmes about any holy site where people go on pilgrimage,
crowded, bustling, an oppressive crush of bodies. It felt like a mediaeval place,
although the people were modern. It wasn’t until Mu’az, the Imam’s son who
has taken up photography, shows Yusuf around the former home of his
mentor that I understood how Mecca has changed. The house is full of
photographs documenting life in the city and the thousands of people who
enter it on hajj. I became lost in the description, contained on just a couple of
pages.

Each floor was a different face of the city’s existence. The lower they went, the
more alienated Yusuf felt: as they moved into more recent years, Mecca’s
immense spirituality receded into the distance. Floor by floor, the old alleys became
wider, and their cobblestones, over which water once ran in rivulets to cool and
refresh the city, were picked off, until they reached the ground floor where houses
had lost their teak-wood windows altogether. Poor squatters had taken over the old
abandoned houses with their roof terraces, and the hillsides had been eaten away to
make way for asphalt that bit through them.

Alem portrays the commercialisation of the ancient holy city as a destruction

of its character and a banishment of its people. She makes it sound as
homogenised as many UK cities now are, full of faceless glass and steel
buildings and commercial enterprise.

There is tension in the book between the orthodox Islamic way of life and
the yearning for freedom of some of the characters. Aisha, the woman whose
emails Detective Nasser reads, has an interesting comment on what is modern
and what traditional. In one of the emails, she tells her German boyfriend an
old story about a girl brought up in chastity, to the extent that she is only
permitted contact with things that take the feminine form in Arabic, and it is a
pair of scissors, which take the masculine declension, that enables her escape
from the basement where she is being kept.

Needless to say, that single masculine instrument was all the girl needed to escape …
An escape that we, the women of the Lane of Many Heads in the twentieth century,
had failed to achieve. We were raised in similar subterranean worlds, and when the
time came for us to be allowed out, our faces had to be effaced with black –
an invisibility cloak that makes us a non-existence – so the masculine world would
not notice us … The weird thing was that this regime of effacement was a sign
of modernity in the Lane of Many Heads, for throughout the neighbourhood’s
history, right up until the early twentieth century, women’s faces had
remained uncovered for all the world to see …

This made me think about how quickly society assimilates what is shouted
about the loudest. I grew up in a town with a large population of Muslim
people who came to work there in the 60s and 70s, mainly from Pakistan and
Bangladesh. I remember the girls I was at school with and their mothers being
self-confident and bold, funny and warm, the same as the rest of us. I
remember their traditional clothes being colourful and bright. That’s no more
than 40 years ago, and yet within the last 20 years or so, the perception of
Muslim women has become one of oppression and
black clothes that swathe them in anonymity in public. It made me think about
Afghanistan and the change that happened when the Taliban controlled the
country. Women went from having the freedom to wear what they wanted,
study at university, and go out to work, to being possessions to be hidden
away.

I found Aisha compelling. She is angry about and frustrated by the way her
community treats women, and the way women comply with that treatment.
She is forthright about who she is and what she believes, but she is also
slightly disgusted by herself. She is the issue of feminism writ large, sure of her
own character and her right to be treated equally but weakened by the
pressure of the louder story told by society that bears down on women and
tells them that they are the source of shame.

We are drip fed information about Aisha by the Lane of Many Heads that adds
context to the content of her emails and allows us to see her through a
different prism to the one she offers through her own words.

Similarly, Yusuf’s story is told partly through his diary entries, in which
he obsesses over his foster sister Azza, and partly through the main narrative
where his present existence as a fugitive from the police and from unknown
criminals is interspersed with recollections from his childhood and early
adulthood. He’s unreliable as a character. It’s suggested by the Lane of Many
Heads that he suffers from madness. He treats fables and mythology as factual
history. He relies on gut feeling as primary evidence that something is true.
He’s also something of a misogynist, an attitude taken on at an early age while
listening to his mother’s peers offer advice to each other in the Sanctuary.

He began to understand that a wronged woman could tear open the doors of heaven
and cause angels to rain down. These heads wrapped in black, these
women prostrating fervently around him, they confirmed his suspicion that women’s
tears were a dangerous thing, and that to women faith was a dough they baked into
bread for food, warmth, and control over their husbands. By feeding her man, she
gets her claws into him.

Aisha and Azza are both under consideration as the victim because both
women disappeared on the day the body was found. In contrast to Aisha, Azza
only exists in the memories of those who knew her. She is described as a quiet
girl who spends most of her time drawing. She is depicted as manipulative in
Yusuf’s diary, perhaps because his love for her is unrequited. She is someone
Aisha envies because she is seemingly so detached from life, flitting from
moment to moment.

Her father, the shop keeper Sheikh Muzahim, rents the top floor of his
building to Yusuf’s mother, Halima. Halima took on responsibility for Azza’s
upbringing when her mother died. This is what brings Yusuf and Azza
together, and is the basis for Yusuf’s obsession.

Yusuf’s obsession with Azza is shared by an older man, Khalil. In the present
of the book, Khalil is a nihilistic, crazed taxi driver who dresses as a Saudi
prince and tries to scare the living shit out of his passengers for a laugh. I
enjoyed his character very much. He’s the son of a rich man, a former airline
pilot down on his luck, a provocateur, a drug user, a man who doesn’t care
about consequences. He’s horrible, but there are reasons for his horridness.

There are other characters that the Lane of Many Heads talks about, seemingly
as a means of sending Detective Nasser down blind alleys of investigation. The
alley claims to want the detective to have a full picture of life along it and a
history of how things came to be the way they are in the present of the book,
but nothing the alley describes adds any clarity to proceedings. In some ways,
it’s the ultimate shaggy dog story.

The second part of the book swings the story around. It consolidates a lot of
the mysteries from part one, focusing on Yusuf, Khalid and a woman called
Nora who is living in Madrid, the semi-captive of a Sheikh. Nora’s story is
about freedom, compromise and belonging. She wishes to be free but
recognises that freedom only comes through being complicitly subjugated to
the Sheikh. Things have moved on in Mecca. Detective Nasser is still hoping to
crack the case, but the nature of the case has changed in ways he can’t see. The
case is now about keys and doors and an ancient quest that goes back to
Solomon and Bilqis. It’s mystical and it made my head swim with
its dreamlike intensity.
Raja Alem is the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
I hadn’t heard of her. My husband bought me the book after hearing her
interviewed on the radio. He thought I would find the novel interesting, and he
was right.

I found it compelling, but it took me a while to read. Longer than a novel of

474 pages normally would. I had to keep stopping to rest my brain, which
wanted to make linear sense of what was going on, at the same time as
knowing it didn’t stand a chance of achieving that aim. I also needed time
to mull over what I had read, and look up things with which I was unfamiliar.
The further in I got, the more I realised that The Dove’s Necklace is
a labyrinth of a book, with multiple layers of story winding around that central
event but never quite reaching it. At times it felt as though I could see over the
wall and glimpse the middle of the story, only for another corner to throw me
off direction again. If you only like your novels to have concrete conclusions,
it’s probably best avoided. If, like me, you also enjoy novels that are more
about the experience of the telling of a story than a clear story arc, and you
don’t mind feeling utterly bewildered for most of the trip, then
I heartily recommend it.