The Devil's Oasis

Starred review from February 26, 2001

The dashing series that began with The White Rhino Hotel
and continued with A Café on the Nile
is moving its larger-than-life cast of exiles in 20th-century North Africa further ahead in time with each book. Still at the center of this latest installment is the exotic Goan dwarf Olivio Alavedo, with his circle of English friends, his beautiful children and his long-nurtured dreams of vengeance on those who have slighted him. The dashing Anton Rider is, as always, on the outs with his lovely and plucky wife, Gwenn, last seen nursing tribesmen mown down by Mussolini's troops in Eritrea. Now it's 1939, and war is about to engulf Cairo and the whole of North Africa, pitting Rider's old buddy, the brutally macho Ernst von Decken, against those accursed Englanders. Gwenn and Anton's eldest son, Wellington, insists on joining the army; what else can a chap do? Once again Gwenn has chosen the wrong lover, a terminally corrupt French fence-sitter, but all that is soon swept aside as the magnetic General Rommel and his Afrika Korps roar in to seize the Suez Canal. Yes, there's a role for wily old desert hand Anton, too, in harassing the German supply lines. It's an all-out, gung-ho war adventure, with much of the period glamour of The English Patient, but not a spot of psychological subtlety. The battle scenes are grimly garish, the plentiful suffering is endured in appropriate stiff-upper-lip silence. Exotic adventure fiction doesn't come much better—and there's obviously a fourth chapter waiting in the wings.