We said we’d be surprised if Geoffrey Household’s 1948 adventure Arabesque were better than The Adversary. Not only wasn’t it better—we didn’t enjoy it. Household was an intelligence officer during World War II, spending part of that time in the Middle East, so the novel’s setting in Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt is one he knew well, but perhaps in his effort to relate the details of espionage he forgot those of plot movement. It was only his third novel of twenty-four. Before we opened it we thought it might be the source for the fun Gregory Peck/Sophia Loren movie Arabesque, but that was actually adapted from Gordon Cotler’s 1966 novel The Cipher. Arabesque follows idealistic British-French woman Armande Herne, as she’s living in Beirut and trying to find political purpose in life. She’s drawn into a couple of wild capers in Palestine, precipitating her relocation to Cairo, where romance blossoms. An interesting part of the book is Household’s musings on a nascent Israel, but unless you crave contemporaneous perspectives on that subject, we don’t think Arabesque is the best usage of valuable time. The cover on this Consul edition, by the way, is the work of Renato Fratini.
