[Editor's note: We're very pleased to have this guest review from Tom Pollock, who spends most of his spare time making up monsters that jump out at you from around street corners. You can read more of his ramblings about stories, plus the odd bit of fiction or verse, at wingsmith.livejournal.com and you can follow him at @tomhpollock. We do.]
A skinny white kid with blond dreds steps off a plane in north Africa. Behind him is a stint in a Seattle prison. Before him: El Iskandriya: the trading capital of Ottoman North Africa. In his hand is a white diplomatic passport, a carte blanche that announces him to be His Excellency, Ashraf al-Mansur, the son of the Emir of Tunis, and by that distinguished heritage accorded the rank of bey. It’s a passport, not just into the country, but into a noble (if virtually broke) family, and an arranged marriage to the daughter of a local gangster.
The trouble is, Raf has no more idea than we do that whether that passport's telling the truth or not.
Pashazade, is, technically, an alternative history. The first world war never got past the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire's still going strong and North Africa owes its allegiance to Stambul. But the details of Grimwood's counterfactual are elegantly backgrounded in casual references to Kaiser and Ren Schmiss. Indeed the more casual they are, the more effective. The very fact that the de facto regent of Egypt is called 'General Saeed Koenig Pasha' bespeaks a rich and complex intertwining of Ottoman and German bloodlines and histories.
But Grimwood doesn't bother explicitly unpicking the historical divergence. The 'What If' scenario is not really his concern. Where the book engages with politics overtly, it's with modern, real world issues like female circumcision and biochemical patents.
Nor despite appearances, is the book really about a murder mystery. Albeit that there is most certainly a murder and a mysterious one at that, at the heart of the plot.
No, at its heart, for me at least, Pashazade is a coming of age story.