Novel set on the Italian Riviera and in London

26th June 2018

The Occasional Virgin by Hannan Al-Shaykh, a novel set on the Italian Riviera and in London.

If you’re in the mood for something different to read then this funny, iconoclastic and ultimately thought-provoking novel by one of the Arab world’s most acclaimed writers might do the trick.

On the surface, the central characters in this novel, two thirty-something Lebanese women, have little in common – Yvonne, blonde, curvaceous and flighty is in desperate search of a man and motherhood whereas Huda is serious, quiet and plagued by self-doubt and emphatically not interested in finding love.  And yet, scratch a little deeper and the similarities are all too apparent.  Both women have fled Lebanon to escape the war and both have made a success of their lives elsewhere – Huda a successful theatre producer in Canada and Yvonne an advertising executive in London.  Despite the fact that Huda is Muslim and Yvonne Christian, their upbringings were similar in terms of conservative religiosity and rigid patriarchy and both women are still struggling with the legacy of their childhoods.

The novel opens with Yvonne and Huda taking a break in the Italian Riviera, hoping that it will recharge their batteries but, instead, the sea reawakens painful memories for both and the short holiday only serves to remind them of their problems.  The pair reunite in London, where Huda is directing a play. Strolling through Hyde Park to Speaker’s Corner, they chance to encounter Hisham, a Sunni Muslim, and get into an altercation with him resulting in him denouncing Huda as an imperfect Muslim and threatening her.  His attitude reminds her of many of the men from her childhood and she decides to teach him a lesson with some surprising and quite hilarious results.

The Occasional Virgin is one of those lovely novels that provokes both laughter and tears. There are certainly plenty of funny scenes, such as the account of the altercation between the various people gathered at Speaker’s Corner and a fair smattering of quasi-absurd moments too, the most delightful of which has got to be Huda’s attempted entrapment of Hisham.  Al-Shaykh’s exploration of the childhood events that have so profoundly affected the women is powerfully executed and often painful to read; we are left with a very clear understanding of why each woman has subsequently found relationships with men troublesome.

But, more than this, Al-Shaykh’s novel makes you think and reconsider your own values.  Huda is directing a stage version of One Thousand and One Nights and tells us that she “has chosen this play to show that women’s wiles are merely a product of their longing to control their own destinies.”  This, in fact, is how Huda has lived her life, weaving a fictional story to escape the grey reality of her life, while she struggles to regain control over her own body.  The Occasional Virgin certainly invites the reader to think about the issues facing women in today’s society, particularly if you happen to have been raised by fundamentalists of whatever religion and it also makes you ponder over attitudes to women and their bodies generally.

Al-Shaykh’s novel captures the essence of Italian summers with some wonderful descriptions of sea and sun and some just delightful imagery describing swallows but most of the novel is set in London and, without overly focusing on the actual place, it seems to manage to convey the complexity of a multi-cultural city.

This is undoubtedly a novel for our time and a very different perspective on it.

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

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