SOURCE: Mahawatte, Royce. “At the Summer Palace.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5083 (1 September 2000): 11.

In the following review, Mahawatte contends that although The Stone Woman is “rich, erudite and admirable,” it tries to achieve too much and fails on a number of levels.

The Stone Woman, the third instalment in Tariq Ali's Islamic Quartet, owes a great deal to the nineteenth-century tradition of humanistic drama within historical debate. Although the novel is rich, erudite and admirable, it is overambitious in its aims and uneven in its achievements. Set near Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century, the novel centres on the conflicts experienced by a noble Ottoman family, and in particular the stroke-afflicted patriarch, Iskander Pasha. Family members, young and old, arrive at the seaside palace to see the paralysed pasha, and they reflect on the past and prepare to face a new future. The slowly recuperating pasha seeks...