[In the following review, King pans The Stone Woman, contending that Ali is not a “natural novelist” and that he lacks the ability to realistically tell a story.]

The Stone Woman is the third installment in Tariq Ali's “Islamic Quartet.” Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1999) concerned the collapse of Muslim Spain with the fall of Granada; The Book of Saladin (1998; see WLT 74:1, p. 245) told of the events leading to the reconquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders; this new novel is a family saga set at a country home outside Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century. The family has served the Sultan for centuries but now is critical of the clergy and awaits the end of the Empire and the birth of a new society that can compete with Europe. Some members of the family are part of an army plot to overthrow the Sultan and install a secular government. The conspirators, however, cannot agree on the relationship of Turkish nationalism to the many minorities that are part of the Ottoman Empire. (A Greek son-in-law has been killed by nationalists in a version of ethnic cleansing.)

The summer house was built as a place of exile for a former favorite and storyteller who was banished after criticizing the Sultan. Another member of the family was an eccentric who implicitly criticized the Sultan by pretending to be him and administering justice where it had otherwise been corrupted. The present generation feels cramped, impotent, like characters in a Chekhov play, and desires larger lives. As we learn about its members' lives and those of their elders, the truth is that despite the appearance of conventionality, their lives have been rich, even romantic.

Ali is not a natural novelist. It is difficult to take seriously such remarks as: “Salman is very depressed by the fact that the Empire has been irreparably decadent for three hundred years.” His own politics can be seen in such lines as “What your philosophers call progress, my dear Baron, has created an inner drought in human beings … no solidarity between human beings. No belief in common except to survive and get rich.” This is a novel in which “Uncle Memed cleared his throat. Salman smiled. Halil played nervously with his moustache.”

Although his novels have impressive historical frames, Ali lacks the talent for making characters and conversations interesting, for dramatic excitement, suspense, and climax, for painting a lively imitation of life. His novels are galleries of stories: “My father assumed the broad and exaggerated tone of a village storyteller. ‘As was his wont, the Sultan sent for … ’” The characters confess most of their intimate life to the Stone Woman of the title, a rock which might be an ancient pagan monument. While Ali aims for a manner close to the period and place of his fiction, he lacks the ear to make it work.

Although hoping to dispel clichés about Islam, Ali is likely to reinforce stereotypes. That the Sultan, having chosen an heir, had his other children killed to prevent factions, I knew; I did not know that they were strangled with a silken cord so that common hands did not touch them. In each novel Ali has characters make pointed references to Islam as being the most tolerant religion in the world, especially toward Jews. Many readers will assume that the portrait of “Jo the Ugly,” an American Jew with an immense pitted nose, is motivated by something other than tolerance: “He takes after his mother's brothers who are shysters and rogues, growing rich by robbing their own people”; “Who knows but the next hundred years might well be the years of people like Jo the Ugly.”