SOURCE: “Baffling Boxed-In,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 1988, p. 552.

In the following review, Mars-Jones offers a mixed assessment of Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.

Which is stronger, the whale or the polar bear? It's not easy to tell, since the bouts are so hard to arrange, but Hilary Mantel comes close to setting up a similar contest in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. The opposed principles in her novel are the intelligence of her heroine, Frances Shore, and the world of Islam, as represented by the city of Jeddah, where Frances joins her architect husband Andrew.

Hilary Mantel made her name with a pair of black comedies, Every Day Is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession; she has also lived in the Middle East, and there seems nothing to stop her putting technique and subject together to produce a novel of exemplary force and fastidiousness. But Saudi Arabia is...