Bookshot #185: When The Apricots Bloom

The Missus' book club read this months ago- possibly even last year at this point and it's been sitting on

my bedside table this entire time until I finally picked it up and read it.

When The Apricots Bloom is set in the waning years of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, when the country was virtually sealed off from the outside world. The lives of three very different women intersect as they try and protect their secrets and navigate the parlous and perilous world of Baghdad under Saddam's rule. Huda is a secretary at the Australian Embassy-- one of the rare, well-paying jobs that are available, her salary causes tension with her husband at home, who has also been laid off from her job, but when the new Deputy Ambassador arrives with a wife, Ally, she is visited by the secret police, the mukhabarat who order her to watch and listen for any scrap of useful information that can benefit the regime.

Ally, for her part, is somewhat unusual. Not many wives accompany their husbands to this particular diplomatic posting, but she has an agenda of her own: her mother spent some time in Baghdad and having lost her to cancer when she was very young, Ally is desperate to find out anything and everything she can about the mother she didn't get a chance to know and what she did while she was in Baghdad.

As the story unfolds, the two women gradually intersect with Rania, a friend from Huda's past- the daughter of a Sheikh who has fallen on hard times (as everyone has) and has problems and secrets of her own. Eventually, the two women are forced to take drastic action to protect the lives of their children. The mukhabarat want to recruit Huda's son Khaled to the feared fedayeen militia. (New recruits have to do something fairly brutal to a prisoner to prove their worth, otherwise, it's done to them in turn-- what exactly is never made clear but ranges from slitting a throat to shooting someone in the head to beheading someone.) Rania, who owns a struggling art gallery also gets a visit from the mukhabarat, who wants her to paint a portrait of the President and advises her that she has a pretty daughter and Uday Hussein would like to meet her. (Also, decidedly not a good thing.)

Together, the old friends bury the hatchet of their past and try and find a solution to save their children. (They do, but I'm not going to tell you how, because of spoilers.)

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it is a nice reminder that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq wasn't exactly warm and fuzzy and didn't treat Iraqis under their control all that well- which is a fact that shouldn't be used to excuse the American invasion of Iraq and everything that came along with it, but it something that gets obscured by the invasion. A lot of the book is based on Wilkinson's actual experience in Iraq as a diplomat's wife (she discovered that one of her Iraqi friends was an informant for the mukhabarat at the time) so the setting, the tone, everything feels very genuine and real. 

On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure that Wilkinson stuck the landing on this one- specifically when it came to the character of Ally. Ally is convinced throughout the book that her mother had done something in Baghdad and had made some sort of connection there and when you find out what exactly happened, it's somewhat of a letdown to me. I go back and forth on it, because in reality, our expectations for people- especially those we don't know all that well are very rarely met in the way we expect and although I have both my parents still I would imagine that those expectations are higher for parents you didn't get to know and want to find some sort of connection with. So on the one hand, the letdown feels very real-- which is in keeping with the overall tone of the book. On the other hand, I don't think it fits into the novel all that well. It had a lot of buildup and buildup and this is what Ally is doing here and these are her secrets and then we don't even find out about directly. Huda finds out about it 'off-screen' as it were, so it just landed with a thud, to me.

Overall: Gripping and vivid, Wilkinson transports the reader to Baghdad and captures the paranoia and secrecy of living under Hussein's regime. It's a quick read- honestly, I could have breezed through in about a day if I wanted to and ultimately, despite a nitpick or two on my part, it was a satisfying read as well. My Grade: *** out of ****