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 “marvelous” 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 harbors a sense of loss that manifests as a wish for control that creeps toward greed: “His needs were simple and he asked for little. … His father’s knife, a bit of land.” The urge to consolidate a legacy drives him to conceal from his brothers an enormous tract of land that’s at stake: A distant cousin has died without a will, and the property will revert to the crown unless Hafez maneuvers the church into recognizing his claim as the eldest living Hamdan male.
The plan collides with Amani’s innocent search for the family truths behind her grandmother’s poem. Her 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. Along with his other schemes, Hafez wants to establish her as a poet in Ammanite society so she’ll write about him. (His conceit offers some of the novel’s best humor, as well as its darkness.)
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 center. 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. The novel positions him as insensible to agendas, hopelessly subject to the whims of the altruistic and the cruel. As politicking pushes Hafez toward an extreme state, Gabe wonders whether “something was not right with his brother, that he was somehow ill,” and indeed, Hafez’s ethical brokenness parallels the larger ironies of political elites undermining the people most at risk of harm, like Musa.
As in “Origin” (2007), Abu-Jaber harnesses the tail wind of a good mystery, and like Zöe Ferraris’s popular “Kingdom of Strangers” (2012), she approaches Middle Eastern modernity with a profluent storytelling style. I have long admired Abu-Jaber’s craftsmanship. The sensuousness she brings to food writing in “Crescent” (2003), “The Language of Baklava” (2005) and “Birds of Paradise” (2011) is not limited to the king’s banquet table here — and food is omnipresent in this story about a sumptuous month-long birthday celebration. Like an intricate recipe, her paragraphs balance interior and external worlds, elegant diction and workmanlike narrative. The effect is a texture of contrasts not unlike the exquisite food at the sheikh’s picnic, with its fire-blistered rosemary pita and “goat cheeses in cylinders and cones and pyramids dusted with ash,” a passage that goes on to braid the meal’s poetics with talk of the region’s politics and interior tensions of marriage and envy. The writing is propulsive — but silkily so, wending on limber paragraphs that allow Abu-Jaber to move with ease across a wide-ranging story that probes conflicted identities.
As Abu-Jaber leans further than ever into her Palestinian American roots to craft this subtle story with the resonance of folklore, she illuminates what has been outstanding about her craft all along.
Sarah Cypher is a freelance book editor and author of “The Skin and Its Girl,” forthcoming from Ballantine in April 2023.
Fencing with the King
By Diana Abu-Jaber
W.W. Norton. 320 pp. $26.95
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