Books of the Month

'Miss Webster and Chérif' by Patricia Duncker

Miss Webster is not a woman to mess with. A redoubtable spinster with a fierce intelligence, she's recently been pushed out of her teaching job and is not happy about it. Despite living amid the rural charms of Little Blessington, she has no time for village tittle-tattle and does not suffer fools gladly. Yet one evening, while watching George Bush on the TV news, she grinds to a halt. Now Mr Bush has been known to induce similar effects in many, but this is a literal halt. She simply stops.

It's not quite a stroke, and not quite a heart attack, but Miss Webster's body seems to be giving up the fight. In hospital though, a wise doctor helps her back to health, and advises her to take a trip. She goes to North Africa. Some time after her return, she opens her door late one evening and finds a handsome young Arab boy she's never seen before. The novel charts the course of their friendship, in a post 9/11 world where Muslim strangers don't pop up in English villages without raising more than a few eyebrows.

This is both an intelligent and a humorous novel. Despite Miss Webster's assertion that she doesn't care about politics, it clearly has something to say about the insidious suspicions, assumptions and misconceptions in today's race- and faith-divided society. Miss Webster turns out to be a fierce defender of the wronged, but from a personal, rather than a political stance. She embodies Fielding's claim in A Passage to India that it is better to fight for one's friend than one's country. My favourite scene in the book was one in which she lends her purse to Chérif to go and buy some groceries at the village shop. Unfortunately the woman serving him thinks he's pinched the purse, and gives Miss Webster a quiet phone call. She, however, is having none of it:

Miss Webster pulverised her telephone in a sudden onset of enlightenment and roared out of her front door. She rampaged down the muddy lane, hatless, in her cardigan and slippers, slicing through the puddles like an armed destroyer, her stockings muddied, all her guns trained on the shop door [...] 'Now listen to me, you racist cow...'

Duncker is interested in portraying a woman on her own, someone not in a relationship, and not surrounded by family. She does it with considerable insight and compassion. It's one thing to show Miss Webster as a formidable old lady, but quite another to uncover her insecurities and fears.

If you've enjoyed Duncker's fiction before, you certainly won't be disappointed with her latest book. And if you've never tried her, Miss Webster and Chérif is a great place to introduce yourself to one of our best novelists.

Susan Tranter

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