Just a palace to call home

HOME is usually the place where adventures end, an odyssey’s final station. For Tahir Shah, however, a mansion towering over a Casablanca shantytown is the starting point of his journey. Its walls encompass the world he explores in his new book, “The Caliph’s House.”

Weary of the grayness of England, the British travel writer searches for an affordable palace -- this is not an oxymoron in Morocco. The country was the holiday destination of his childhood, a sort of surrogate homeland for his Afghan father as endless wars prevented him from seeing his native region of Nuristan (meaning “the land of light”) in the Hindu Kush mountains.

After unsuccessful trips to Fes and Marrakech, Shah writes, the mother of an old school friend telephones him, offering to sell her Casablanca mansion. Dar Khalifa (the Caliph’s House), she whispered, would need “a strong man to take it on.”

Once he buys the Caliph’s House, he is the king that reigns but does not govern. Like the eunuchs of China’s Forbidden City, the three guardians who came with the palace run it and will not allow their master to get in their way.

Shah chronicles with delight how the local ecosystem is transformed by his presence. Stories unfold, often fueled by his faux naivete, which he wields with the cunning of a bazaar merchant. Eventually, he gains acceptance. There is a certain parallel with the way Casablanca sheds its colonial identity, with its French boulevards changing into Arab streets.

At its best, Shah’s writing evokes Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s keen eye for the absurd. As if taking a cue from biblical ancestors, a cloud of locusts invades the house. Then, in a passage that faintly echoes Camus’ “The Plague,” Shah tells us that the “balance of nature prevailed, and the ... locusts [were] slaughtered by the rise of the rats.” The palace guardians treat Shah with the sort of condescension that members of a metaphysical club reserve for an outsider. Their new master has upset Qandisha, the jinn or evil spirit that inhabits the house. They mediate between the ghost and their boss, who is advised to placate her with lavish plates of couscous.

Shah’s narrative gravitates toward the lighter side of any story. His sprawling abode provides him with an endless source of fun, sometimes at the expense of the locals, a tendency he has shown in other books. Most readers will laugh, but this may not be everybody’s cup of tea. The fact that he bankrolls the whole enterprise -- the big joke, then, is on him -- may not be enough to dispel the impression that sometimes he is just an upper-class Englishman (or Anglo-Afghan) in a hot country.

“The Caliph’s House” probably is not in the same class as “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Shah’s fine 2001 travelogue of India that has echoes of V.S. Naipaul’s prose. In “The Caliph’s House,” the cast is initially portrayed in cartoonish sketches and only slowly evolves into mature characters. Sinister men lurk in the recesses. After converting to Islam, an American in love with a Moroccan girl says he has found the right path: “A world without America.”

This book also seems to be about Shah’s quest for his place in the world. Morocco is a connection to his family history, where his grandfather spent the last years of his life as a widower in Tangier, on the northern Atlantic coast. Seven centuries ago, a young Berber, Ibn Battutah, sailed from Tangier on a voyage that took him around much of the known world for almost three decades. He then returned to his birthplace and his tales were compiled in the Rihla or “Travels,” a masterpiece of travel writing.

Maybe for reasons known only to the jinns, Shah was drawn to Morocco to spin the yarns where Ibn Battutah left off.

Avedis Hadjian, a former writer and editor for CNN online, is a frequent contributor to Book Review.