A Patricia Duncker Interlude.

After a bit of a search around the house I have assembled a little Patricia Duncker tower - all the books of hers that I have in chronological order. I notice I am missing two: The Strange Case of the Composer and the Judge which came out this year in hardback, and Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees.


I've just finished Miss Webster and Chérif which features an elderly woman, Miss Elizabeth Webster, as heroine. She is cantankerous and Duncker gives her some hilarious lines. There are some equally funny descriptions: 'She arranged an expression of sympathetic tragedy and held it up in front of her face.' Apart from being a lightly written mystery, it is also an exploration of the western view of the Iraqi conflict, and found myself considering, for the first time, the toppling of Saddam Hussein from a completely alien view-point.