PaperBackers: Only Pain, No Gain

Only Pain, No Gain

“The most shocking thriller you’ll read this year” takes off with a bang and ends with “To be continued” — a whimper if we’ve seen one. Judith Rashleigh, an assistant at an auction house in London, is talked down to by her boss and almost every other person. The job is a prestigious one but it does not pay; after a chance meeting with an old classmate, Judith starts to work at a gentleman’s club. All is well till she stumbles upon an art scam operating out of the auction house and is sacked. Tired of being a pushover, she sets off to seek justice. But soon, Judith finds herself caught in a dangerous, bloody loop she’s come to enjoy a bit more than she’d imagined.

A review on Goodreads described it as “50 Shades of Grey meets The Goldfinch, but not in a good way”. It’s bang on. Judith is annoyingly self-involved, and her sociopathic tendencies result in erotic mise–en–scènes which always end badly for the other people involved. This thread is stretched out for far too long and gets utterly tedious. At 300-plus pages, it’s thick enough to cause some pain when you smack your head with it. So keep it aside unless you seek pleasure in pain.

The Holy Sail
Abdulaziz Al-Mahmoud
Bloomsbury
427 pages
` 499

Dull Passage

Translated from the Arabic by Karim Taboulsi, The Holy Sail uses historical events of the late 15th century to flesh out a story of love, honour, and betrayal. Under their general Alfonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese have set out for the Islamic world where trade is robust and people enjoy religious tolerance. Their intentions are clean: to spread Christianity at any cost along the trade route spanning all the way till Calicut in India. But for all the violence that is inflicted, the scenes of war are underwhelming.The translation is unpretentious and simple till it tips over into a drab narration without excitement or urgency. Abdulaziz’s characters suffer in the bargain, leaving us no one that you truly care for in the story.

There was hope in Halima, who falls in love with the noble Arab leader Ghurair bin Rahhal amidst this violence. But her marriage to bin Rahhal compromises the fire in her. However, she plays a key role in the culmination of the story as it comes on the back of her sacrifice. Abdulaziz is thorough in his details, but he is weighed down by his overbearing research and wealth of knowledge.