The Stone Woman by Tariq Ali. Verso Books, London, 274 pp, £15 in the UK

Like Edward Said, whose endorsement adorns this book, Tariq Ali is a prolific and spirited writer whose mission is to explain…

Like Edward Said, whose endorsement adorns this book, Tariq Ali is a prolific and spirited writer whose mission is to explain the Occidental world to an often suspicious Western society. Unlike Said, however, Ali also writes novels, along with histories and usually polemical political accounts. The Stone Wom- an describes the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which, in a novel replete with such bullroom imagery, is described by one character as being like a "drunken prostitute lying with her legs wide open, neither knowing nor caring who will take her next".

The book is cleverly arranged. The family members are gathered in 1899 at the rural home of Iskender Pasha, a retired notable, to hear how he was banished from the Istanbul Court. While assembled, the different members tell their respective life stories, often to the Stone Woman, a statue to which they confess their inner-most concerns. But this is no Marquezian sweep of history and humanity. Instead, it is a rather stylised and slight account, more reminiscent of an Arab poem in translation, with the characters given to gnomic utterances such as that "the crescent moon, always travels fast as if in search of a lover, but soon it will become full-blown like my belly . . .".

The images, like the characters, seem somewhat familiar and forced. Nevertheless, the cultural atmosphere described is unusual and the rather traditional format is a refreshing antidote to other more frivolous fictions.

Eamon Delaney is a novelist and critic