"Set in 1950s Casablanca, this sumptuous story unveils a Moroccan man’s conflicts in the face of uprisings against the colonial hand that feeds him as it starves his compatriots."
Set in Morocco in 1955, against the backdrop of uprisings for independence from France, Jane Johnson’s The Black Crescent is an enthralling tale of personal and political conflict. Radiant with rich, free-flowing prose, it’s underpinned by divided loyalties, a magical legend, and a nation’s impulse to be free from cruelly oppressive colonialism.
In 1929, Hamou - a boy whose palms bear the mark of a magical zouhry - sees his first corpse in the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco. According to legend, a zouhry is a half-djinn with the ability to move between worlds and find treasure.
Come 1955, Hamou is working in Casablanca, still “marvelling at the miracle of electricity” after many years in the city. Spurred to become a police officer after seeing the corpse, he’s now “paid to keep order for the very regime he had so disliked.” In fact, French money now pays for “everything that made life worth living.” That said, Hamou still ponders the unfairness of people being forced to “live squeezed together in flimsy shacks” while “the French lived in fancy white buildings, drove gleaming limousines and made fortunes out of the resources they dug out of someone else’s country.”
At the hammam on the eve of Ramadan, Hamou is accused of being a traitor “working for the bastard French!” Then, after reuniting a lost little boy with his prostitute mother, his zouhry magic is praised, though he deems it superstitious nonsense. After undertaking firearms training, he spies his neighbour Zina, a self-sufficient, “smart, modern young woman”, acting suspiciously. Turns out, she’s a member of the Black Crescent, a “violent dissident splinter group” of an organisation dedicated to fighting for independence.
Presciently warned by a beggar that “sooner or later you’ll have to come down on one side or the other or you’ll find yourself falling between them”, Hamou is thrust into the throes of that exact conflict when he realises that rather than arrest Zina, he wants to kiss her. Add to that witnessing terrible atrocities, and Hamou’s predicament has him feeling like he really is “a child of the djinns, indeed. He was a creature between two worlds, who didn’t fit in at all.”
Tender, smoothly readable and alive with exquisite detail, Hamou’s journey through fear and conflicting loyalties to find his treasure is nothing but nourishing, illuminating and hands-down heart-stirring.
| Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
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