An Obvious Enchantment: A Novel - Hardcover

Malarkey, Tucker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375504095 ISBN 13: 9780375504099

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

An epic tale of love and faith, An Obvious Enchantment marks the debut of a stunning new literary talent. It is a story about desire--for love, for knowledge, and for God--and about our capacity to ensnare ourselves in the deceptive architecture of our own dreams. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it plunges you from the first page into a sensuous world of seductive characters and duplicitous charm, a world alive with color and atmosphere from which it is hard to emerge without wanting to return.

About this title

About the Author

Tucker Malarkey was raised in San Francisco. She attended Georgetown University and was then hired by the Washington Post where she spent the next four years working on the Foreign Desk and then with columnist Haynes Johnson on the book, SLEEPWALKING THROUGH HISTORY, a best-selling account of the Reagan years. Before accepting a magazine job in New York, she decided to go to Africa for three months, visiting an island off the coast of Kenya where there were no cars and only the occasional phone; a place that seemed ideal for figuring out a life plan. The trip that was to last three months lasted two years. Much of the first year was spent on the aforementioned island, where she taught Moslem boys in a broken down school house with dirt floors and decided her life plan would involve writing fiction.

Upon returning to America, she was admitted to the Iowa Writers Workshop where she began a novel for which she received a Michener Grant in 1994. She spent the next few years teaching and working on various literary projects between Portland and New York City, while at work on a second novel. She currently teaches writing workshops in Portland's public school system and is the Editor-at-Large for TIN HOUSE magazine, a literary journal based in Portland and New York. She is at work on her third novel.

From the Back Cover

"How cleverly Tucker Malarkey refashions the quest novel, and what a world of mirrors and mysteries she creates. I would happily have followed her heroine
anywhere. An Obvious Enchantment is as seductive as its title promises."
--Margot Livesey

"An exciting, intelligently imagined story, well written and well paced, with a very skillful use of place and atmosphere."
--Peter Matthiessen

"As the mystery unfolds, Malarkey raises intriguing questions about the actions that passions drive us to--with profound or searing consequences."
--Kirkus Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Perched above the Indian Ocean and surrounded by lush foliage that blocks out everything but the sea--sweet frangipani, jasmine, and wild orchid--the Hotel Salama is an unlikely place to conduct research. Proud, sharp-tongued, and solitary by disposition, Ingrid Holtz arrives at the hotel in search of her professor, Nick Templeton, to whom she is drawn by interests of a more than academic nature. Templeton is a maverick, as much reviled for his unconventional methods as he is envied for his results. His latest theory has driven him to the island of Pelat, to unravel a legend about an ancient African king said to have brought Islam to the Swahili coast. No one has heard from him in months.

Tangled in a mystery whose clues lurk in the pages of the Koran, and transported into a world where women are possessed by spirit husbands and fresh curses are whispered over tea, Ingrid is forced to realize that there are many things she does not know about this man who inhabits her dreams and haunts her mind. With the help and hindrance of Finn Bergmann, the enigmatic son of the founder of Salama, she begins to uncover a web of alarming incidents. Templeton's research has carried him to the hot core of the island's darkest confrontation. How far will he go in his passion for the truth? What is he willing to do to protect his newfound faith - and where has he gone? Ingrid embarks on a quest that opens her heart and threatens to unravel her mind.

An epic tale of love and faith, An Obvious Enchantment marks the debut of a stunning new literary talent. It is a story about desire - for love, for knowledge, and for God - and about our capacity to ensnare ourselves in the deceptive architecture of our own dreams. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it plunges you from the first page into a sensuous world of seductive characters and duplicitous charm, a world alive with color and atmosphere from which it is hard to emerge without wanting to return.

Reviews

Religious mysticism, cultural anthropology and contemporary women's issues charge Malarkey's affecting first novel, an uncommon romance charting the restless intellect of an obsessive academic. Cultural anthropologist Ingrid Holtz convinces her university to fund a trip to Kenya's Swahili Coast, ostensibly to search for links between Egypt's monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten and African Islam. Her ulterior motive is to search for her mentor, 60-year-old mad genius Nick Templeton, who has disappeared on a coastal island while investigating the origins of African Islam. The island of Pelat is itself a mystery: a cat-infested paradise torn between ancient tradition and modern progress since Swede Henrik Bergmann arrived many years before with his young son, Finn, and built the luxury hotel Salama (the Swahili word for peace). When Ingrid reaches the island, Stanley Wicks, an unscrupulous Brit, is erecting a new hotel in the village where devout islanders fled after Salama was built. Finn, raised by a local mystic, must seek middle ground in the battle between ancient mysteries and inevitable change; he keeps a protective eye on Ingrid as she looks for Templeton and finds her way to academic and personal growth. Ingrid and Templeton's research, guided by suspicious locals, barflies at Salama and passages of the Koran, gets foggy, sucking some thrill from the novel's final revelations. But Ingrid is a complex and seductive character who transcends those deficits, and her romance with Finn mostly sidesteps formula. Her preoccupation with truth invests this multifaceted, ambitious debut with a contemporary relevance. 7-city author tour. (Aug.) FYI: Malarkey is senior editor at the quarterly Tin House.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When we first meet archaeology student Ingrid Holtz, she is arguing vehemently with an Egyptian farmer about to plow a field she thinks might hide the remains of a palace, so we know right away that she is a toughie. She's also fearsomely committed to Professor Templeton, her mentor, and when he disappears, she manages to persuade her department to fund what amounts to a search mission. She tracks him to Nairobi and thence to Pelat Island, where she encounters a rafter of dissolute, disillusioned ex-pats and some wily Africans while reencountering Finn Bergmann, with whom she had a sexually charged but sexless exchange in Nairobi. She bangs on doors to try to locate Templeton, then hunkers down and waits. And waits. There are undoubtedly some evocative passages in this debut, but the novel stretches on into tedium as Templeton fails to appear, and one finally ends up exasperated with Ingrid for wasting her time (and ours). When he finally does materialize to explain his odd behavior, it's a letdown. In the end, only the opaque FinnAa white boy gone native, whose father disappeared after building the island's only hotelAseems a truly viable character. Not a requisite purchase.
-ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"It was so easy to die in Africa." Could that simple fact be the source of our endless western attraction to the African continent? Are all those romances and melodramas and true-life sagas about beautiful women who hear the clarion call of the jungle really about the need to experience life by being close to death? There's a lot of Hollywood in that scenario, a lot of tired cliche, but there's also plenty of elemental truth. First-novelist Malarkey (see Story behind the Story, opposite page) manages to get past the cliches and hit an archetypal nerve in this gripping story of a young archaeologist, Ingrid Holtz, who comes to a remote island off the coast of Kenya in search of her mentor, Professor Templeton, a mercurial scholar who may have found proof that an African king brought Islam to the continent. Yes, there are elements of "Heart of Darkness" here: Templeton is a more benign version of Conrad's Captain Kurtz, and his obsessions serve to fuel the fires of conflict between the Africans on the island and the scattering of latter-day colonials. Ingrid herself is part Marlow and part Isak Dinesen; she doesn't know if she's coming to Africa to return Templeton to civilization or to lose herself in whatever mystery he's found. Complicating the issue are her tempestuous feelings for another man, the son of a hotel owner who can't quite drink away his colonial heritage. Just as we never know for sure if Malarkey's novel is a very convincing African melodrama or something more, so her heroine can't quite decide if she is being seduced by her own dreams or if she really has found the source of life's mystery. An impressive debut. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Egypt

Though the ground was hard and sharp, Ingrid knelt in the dirt. The dry surface layer, lifted by the afternoon wind, dusted her damp skin. She brushed the hair from her eyes, streaking her cheek with brown, looked up at the farmer who stood above her and placed her hands flat on the earth. "This is no good for farming," she said. "It's very, very old." The farmer's face was stubbornly blank. He did not want to understand. She began digging, jagged bits of rock tearing at her fingertips. Soon she found something. Holding up a shard, she smiled. "You see, antiquities. Good for tourists. Good for money." The farmer squatted and reached for the shard. After studying it, he threw it down and shook his head.

"This was a palace," Ingrid said, retrieving the shard. "A place where kings lived. Pharaohs."

The farmer motioned toward the north. "Giza," he said resolutely. "Kings in Giza."

"Giza is where they died. They lived here."

"Giza tourists. No here," the farmer said, waving a brown hand over the soil. "No here."

At a distance, a donkey stood in calm resignation, one hoof slightly raised. As the farmer approached, it opened a mournful eye. The donkey was hitched to a crude plow with rusted blades that cut into the earth as the animal again plodded forward in the heat.

Ingrid walked back to the jeep. "He won't listen," she said. "I think it's because I'm a woman."

"It's because he's a Fellahin," Louis said. "They've been doing this for three thousand years."

"Like you, the Fellahin are impressed only by Giza." Ingrid chewed a fingernail and watched the farmer push an uneven row into the soil. "Damn." She got out of the jeep and stalked across the barren field. The farmer had turned the plow to start the next row when Ingrid stood in front of him. "You understand maat? It's very bad maat to plant here. Your crop will fail. You have a family? They will get sick. Malaria. Maybe they will die." The farmer stared at her through the donkey's ears. Then he clicked with his tongue, urging it on. "Wait," Ingrid said. "Just wait. I can get money for you, money instead of farming. How much money for this whole field of crops? How much for one year of crops?"

"Much money."

"How much?" she insisted.

"Enough for donkey." He pointed at his harnessed animal. "Two donkey."

"Two donkeys. Just wait, then. Do you understand? No more today. Tomorrow I will bring you money for two donkeys." The farmer nodded, and Ingrid was content for the moment to leave it at that.

Louis was waiting in the jeep. "I need to get back to Cairo," she told him. "I've promised him two donkeys' worth of piastres. How much is a donkey worth, anyway?"

"Why are you doing this?" Louis said, starting up the jeep. "You leave in two days."

"Wait." Ingrid held him back. "I want to see if he starts again." They sat with the motor idling until the farmer led the donkey to a stand of tall grass into which he folded himself as the donkey began to graze.

"He's gone to sleep."

"He's dreaming about how with two more donkeys he'll be able to plow the field three times as fast," Louis said.

"We're going to have to dig after sunset. I need to find something tonight."

"You will get a bad reputation with the Fellahin."

"I already have a bad reputation with the Fellahin. But I have a feeling about this place. I could at least mark it for future work."

Louis' eyes traveled across the plot of land. "I know mudbrick is not my specialty, but to me it looks like an ordinary field."

"Be a friend and pretend it's important. Pretend there's an inverted pyramid under that farmer's plow."

Louis smiled and put the jeep into gear. "Because you are leaving, I will indulge you."

They followed a maze of dirt tracks dividing the planted fields. The side of the road was lined with papyrus, the reed used for centuries as paper by the people of Egypt. A few ancient scraps had survived: love letters, poems, lists-relics of undocumented lives of incidental men and women indentured to their pharaoh. This pharaoh was known by other titles: one of them was "king," another "god."

Ingrid thought, not for the first time, that it must have been a rotten life for them. Their crops and families were abandoned as soon as another temple or tomb was to be built. And something was always being built. Sometimes it was decades before they returned home, backs bent or broken by the weight of monumental stone. She imagined the seeds of insurrection taking root and quickly withering again because any such feeling reflected a dangerous lapse in faith--a disbelief in the system of maat. And if you disturbed the balance of maat, you opened your life to danger.

They reached the paved road to Cairo and slowly picked up speed, the jeep lurching with each gear shift. Ingrid tied her hair in a scarf against the wind, chasing and capturing the skybound strands with one hand, anchoring the scarf with the other. She was momentarily blinded, trying to control the hair that, unbound, drew too much attention in this country.

"Why did you decide to study ruins that no one could see?" Louis shouted, his own hair a chaos of dark curls.

"Because there is no truth in temples," Ingrid shouted back, pulling hair from her mouth. "It's propaganda. A king's story as he wanted it told. Glorified, altered, edited. It's unlikely that any of it actually happened. I want to know how the people lived, not just how the elite chose to die."

Louis swore in French as a motorcycle zagged in front of them. "The rest of the population catered to that elite, I can tell you that."

"Even the kings and queens of this country had to live, eat and make love somewhere. It's pretty damn clear it wasn't in the pyramids or the temples. It's unfortunate that they chose to build their palaces out of the best fertilizer around."

"They were temporary," Louis said. "Life was temporary."

In the hotel lobby they paused, stunned by the sudden darkness. A few pieces of luggage leaned against the wall. An old paper lay on an age-stained table tinged with the neglect of rapid comings and goings. The places in between, Ingrid thought, are what you notice when you prepare to leave.

They moved toward the back of the room, allowing their eyes to adjust. Up ahead at the reception desk, a letter waved at them in the dim light. "For the lady," the girl behind the desk said sullenly. Ingrid stepped more quickly, reaching the desk first. The girl blinked her charcoaled eyes at Louis. "Nothing," she said.

Louis guided Ingrid up the stairs while she studied the postmark. "So your Templeton is not dead after all," he said.

She tucked the envelope away and groped in her bag for her room key. "You're not the least bit curious, are you?"

"About Templeton? Absolutely."

"About the mudbrick."

"Oh, that. A bit, yes."

"It's not very sexy, is it. I should have chosen something sexier. I'd have more funding. In the Cairo museum, I saw an old makeup case of Hathepsut's from before she became pharaoh, when she was queen. The inscription on the case was 'God's Wife.' It wasn't found in her tomb because she died as a god, not as his wife."

"For some men, maybe this is not so sexy."

"That's why men don't write about Hatschepsut. They write about pyramids."

Louis laughed.

Ingrid stopped outside her door. "I need a shower."

"And a wash of the hair." Louis smiled sadly. "With the dust, the shine dies."

Light filtered through the thin curtains in Ingrid's room. She tied them open with ribbon she had bought at the bazaar. The street below was hazy with dust; the desert had again breathed on the city, covering its greenery with a patina of fine sand as if to say Don't forget me. I can bury you as I buried others.

She sat down at her writing table, a faded map taped to the surface. She had learned the trick about maps from Templeton. They were like stories, he had told her, redrawn and reinvented throughout history. In Egypt, there were pharaohs who, after death, had been effectively erased from the map, their temples and cities destroyed, their names chipped out of the very obelisks that had honored them. Akhenaten was one such pharaoh, Hatshepshut another. Akhenaten had attracted more discussion and debate than almost any figure of ancient times, with his radical worship of one god and his visionary poetic writings. Much had been made of the resemblance of his God Aten to the Christian God: "Thou hast made heaven afar off that thou mayest behold all that thou hast made when thou wast alone, appearing in thy aspect of the Living Aten, rising and shining forth," he had written. "Thou art in my heart, but there is none other who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten. Thou hast made him wise in thy plans and thy power."

Ingrid had steeped herself in these writings and the writings inspired by him, drawn initially by his conflicting reputations as the instigator of monotheism and forerunner of Christ and as an atheist and a madman.

"Where there is argument," Templeton had said when she presented her thesis outline to him, "there is life. Akhenaten is a fine place to begin."

Hatshepsut had come later. Templeton alone had seen Ingrid's commitment ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375504095
• ISBN 13: 9780375504099
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416