Where realism meets fable
Fencing with the King Diana Abu-Jaber W.W. Norton
The line between realism and fable is sometimes rapier thin, especially in the family tales that inspired Diana Abu-Jaber's eighth book, Fencing with the King. A Palestinian Jordanian immigrant, Abu-Jaber's father was an alleged favourite fencing partner of King Hussein I in their youth. This lore echoes through the novel's premise. It's 1995, and Amani Hamdan, a poet in upstate New York, pushes her father, Gabe, to accept an incredible invitation: attend the birthday celebration of his old friend, the king of Jordan, and rekindle old memories in a fencing match. Her father has been in the United States 30 years and resists the hubbub, but Amani has found a scrap of her Palestinian grandmother's writing, and curiosity promises escape from her own problems.
Amani's quest to discover the truth behind the fragmented poem will lead to a family scandal involving their host at the festivities — Hafez, her “marvellous” uncle who is also the king's right-hand man. In the month that Amani and Gabe are in Jordan, family machinations will prove subtler and more treacherous than royal birthday politics. Behind its flashy premise full of swords and falconry, Fencing with the King enacts the deft footwork of a veteran novelist reinvigorating a timeless story of rivalry over inheritance with a dash of personal history.
To write fiction about the Palestinian diaspora involves finding ways to acknowledge the fragmentation of exile — usually in the novel's form, its situation or its characters' lives. In this case, that fragmentation is embodied by Hafez. He has become the person with a finger on all the political chess pieces by long downplaying his mother's Palestinian origins, but he harbours a sense of loss that manifests as a wish for control that creeps toward greed.
Amani's agenda is not as compulsive as her uncle's, but she, too, seeks reconstitution — living with her parents after a divorce and having drunkenly disgraced herself at the campus where she teaches. Amani seems more bewildered than burdened by this aftermath, and rather than dwell on it, she goes in search of clues and pries into forbidden wings of the house, meanwhile feeling newly wary of her once-lionized Uncle Hafez.
The reader hopes to see Amani discover and resist her uncle's more nefarious ideas head-on, and the lack of this fuller reckoning is a palpable absence. Their agendas find an indirect clash, however, in their long-lost relative Musa, who most represents the novel's moral centre. Discovered by Amani's search, and a threat to Hafez's plans for the land, Musa lives with a developmental disability and has been cared for by nuns.
As in Origin (2007), Abu-Jaber harnesses the tail wind of a good mystery, and she approaches Middle Eastern modernity with a profluent storytelling style.
The writing is propulsive — but silkily so, wending on limber paragraphs that allow AbuJaber to move with ease across a wide-ranging story that probes conflicted identities.