‘Come to the point,’ said Gorde impatiently.
(the Doomed Oasis, page 151)
This is Hammond Innes’ longest novel to date, 336 pages in the Collins paperback edition. It is a slow-burning tale of oil prospecting on the politically sensitive border between sheikdoms in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, given flavour by the soap opera theme that the young man who travels out to Arabia and triggers the narrative is the bastard son by a Welsh serving girl of the posh Arab expert and obsessive oil prospector, Colonel Charles Whitaker.
The story is a first-person narrative told by the Welsh solicitor, George Grant, who sets out to investigate the young man’s subsequent death and who becomes the reluctant eyewitness to the story’s key developments and tragic denouement.
The plot
Like many a movie, the book opens in a court where staid solicitor George Grant is called on to give the evidence which will decide the fate of the man in the dock, a ‘national hero’, a ‘global figure’, who is on trial for murder. So what led up to this scene?… cue shimmering film effects and travelling-back-in-time music…
1. Escape to Saraifa
Well, it all began four years earlier when Grant is called to a house in Swansea where he finds that a 19-year-old boy, David Thomas, who’s escaped from Borstal, has returned to the family home and hit his father so severely that he’s caused a fatal stroke. It quickly emerges that the assault took place because the boy has discovered he’s not the man’s son at all; all this time both his ‘parents’ have lied to him – and he is actually the bastard son of the legendary adventurer and oil prospector in Arabia, Colonel Charles Whitaker, who they used to refer to as ‘Uncle Charles’.
Grant has been called in because his firm handles the monthly payments that come from Whitaker’s bank in Bahrain to the mother’s account – maintenance, or guilt money. When the ‘father’ dies as a result of his blows, David is arrested – but promptly escapes police custody to arrive, wet and injured, in Grant’s office where, against his better judgment and all his professional training, Grant helps the boy stow away on a ship bound for Arabia.
Old Captain Griffiths likewise takes pity on this intense, unhappy young man, allowing him passage on his ship and helping smuggle him ashore in Arabia, where he’s collected by his father’s men. The last Grant hears is a letter saying that David’s met his scary father, Colonel Whitaker (beak nose, patch over one eye, feared by his men, close confederate of the sheikh) and is beginning courses in oil drilling, with a view to helping him with his prospecting.
2. Enquiries of an executioner
Three years later Grant is shocked to receive a letter saying David is missing, presumed dead, in the Empty Quarter of Arabia. During that time Grant had become the UK solicitor for Colonel Whitaker, receiving funds from all kinds of business and sheikhs, before disbursing them to buy the equipment for a major oil prospecting expedition. Whitaker is obsessed with the quixotic idea that the profitable Saudi oil seams carry on into the small sheikdom of Saraifa. The shocking news that David is dead is confirmed by an obituary in The Times. And then Captain Griffiths turns up in Grant’s office with a package a harassed David had given him before his fateful, final mission, to be delivered to Grant by hand.
Is David really dead? How did he die? Was he murdered? Was he about to make a great discovery? Who was he working for? —- Trying to answer these questions is the motor of the plot driving Grant to meet and interview as many people connected with the events as possible for the middle 200 pages of the book.
The package contains a last will and testament – for David senses he will die on his last prospecting mission – along with a pledge to drill in specified locations on the Saraifa-Hadd border, which David hopes Grant can force the CEO of the oil company he and his father work for – GODCO – to sign. To make that happen Grant will have to fly to Arabia…
3. The Empty Quarter
Grant flies out to Bahrain and encounters various players including the cool, calculating Erkhard, MD of GODCO in his high-rise office. Tricky and evasive, he nonetheless convinces Grant that the company did everything it could to mount a search & rescue operation for David, but found nothing. Grant goes on to the hospital to meet David’s twin sister, Susan, a nurse working out there. He meets an Italian journalist Ruffini, who is rooting round looking for a story. He meets Sir Philip Gorde, the GODCO boss, who refuses to sign David’s document requesting drilling at key locations, which Grant has been instructed to present to him.
To explain why, Gorde flies Grant over the desert to see the locations, to show him they are on the politically sensitive border between Saraifa and Hadd, players in a centuries old blood feud. But to Gorde’s own surprise, from the plane they see a team drilling illegally and land on a gravel stretch of desert to quiz them. The drilling is being led by one Entwistle, who had met and respected David and now is, unofficially, following up David’s hunch about the oil on the border.
Grant’s dialogue with Entwistle is made up of characteristic Innes evasions.
Entwistle hesitated… ‘It isn’t easy to explain,’… he hesitated… Entwistle hesitated… He hesitated… unable, apparently, to put it into words… Again the hesitation… (pp.149-50)
When Grant gets to ask Entwistle whether he thinks David is still alive there is more evasion.
He hesitated… ‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked. ‘He hesitated…. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he muttered… (p.153)
4. The doomed oasis
To Grant’s horror, Gorde flies off leaving Grant with Entwistle and his drilling crew in the middle of the desert, and five minutes later they’re attacked by armed bedouin. They flee in the Land Rover and drilling lorry and, after an arduous journey across desert sand and gravel, arrive at the much-mentioned Saraifa oasis, where they are promptly arrested by the ruler, sheikh Makhmud. He is very angry that they’ve been drilling on the border as it could trigger a war with the neighbouring Emir of Hadd. A tense counsel of the bedou elders is interrupted when one of the precious water pipes to the village, the falajes, fails and Entwistle makes a quick getaway in the Land Rover. Should Grant go with him?
‘I don’t know’, I said. I didn’t know anything for certain… He hesitated. (p.166)
Grant meets Khalid, the son of sheikh Makhmud and, as usual, the encounter is marked by hesitation, non-communication, evasion.
There were many things I wanted to ask him but this didn’t seem the moment. (p.170)
There was a moment then when he hesitated as though about to tell me something…. he replied ‘I don’t know.’… before I could question him he had drawn back… (p.172)
And then, finally, he meets the mysterious and legendary Charles Whitaker. He lives in a few rooms in a large empty mansion in the village and, it turns out, has the same conversational style as every other Innes character.
He didn’t say anything… He made no comment… He shrugged… the silence between us hung heavy as the thick night air… ‘It’s not easy to explain. You don’t understand the situation.’
What is clear is that: the little sheikdom of Saraifa, a castle and village based in an oasis, is under constant attack from the sands of the desert. It is only protected by a line of thorn trees and it only produces dates and rice etc thanks to an ancient system of falajes or water pipes, bringing water some thirty miles from the mountains. There used to be dozens but they have fallen into disrepair, now there are only six, and the men from Hadd are sabotaging these last ones, threatening to destroy all of them and, with them, Saraifa itself, if the illegal drilling continues.
There is a confusing scene where Erkhard flies in and appears to agree with Whitaker that the company will drill the disputed location – this leads sheikh Makhmud to organise a massive celebration feast, described in detail. But then Gorde arrives and, in front of everyone, tears the agreement up. In light of the blowing up of the falaj and some other violent exchanges, Gorde says neither his company nor any other will take the risk of triggering a war. He stalks out and the atmosphere turns very ugly as the jubilant Arabs give vent to their frustration. Whitaker returns to his half-empty palace. Grant returns to the isolated turret room the sheikh had allotted him. Crowds gather in the village square and are harangued by hotheads, and appear to go off and blow up one of the westerner’s airplanes. Grant is afraid.
5. The Quicksands of Umm al Samim
Now GODCO has definitively sworn off drilling on the border, Whitaker tells Grant he wants to liquidate all his assets in the UK and do the drilling out on the border himself as a freelance – although he knows he risks being murdered by Hadd’s men. Grant gets into a Land Rover driven by Whitaker’s servant to leave Saraifa but they reach the village square only to be blocked by armed men and Grant is returned all over again to his room in the turret.
In this tense atmosphere Grant is brought before the sheikh’s son, Khalid, who tells him David is alive. David’s mysterious disappearance/death was a set-up. The previous 200 pages, and all of Grant’s investigations so far, have been for nothing, based on a false premise.
Before that can sink in Khalid’s bodyguards whisk Grant into a Land Rover and they set off on a journey to Whitaker’s oil drilling rig thirty miles south. Here they learn that Whitaker has ordered his team to pack up and set off to drill on the dangerous border (leaving this reader to ask: why didn’t they quiz Whitaker about this back in Saraifa? Why don’t they simply order the drilling crew not to move?).
From there they drive at speed to a friendly village, Dhaid, and have barely been greeted by the hairy old sheik and his ragamuffin crew, before Khalid receives the message that the men of Hadd are massing for an attack on Saraifa, the doomed oasis. Khalid must return to his father – but he insists that Grant must change into native garb and be taken by a guide who doesn’t speak English into the remote quicksands of Umm al Samim, for this is where David is hiding out. Crikey.
Why did David fake his own death?
Khalid explains that he and David cooked up the idea of David’s disappearance for the publicity, to get it reported in the press, to bring pressure to bear on the oil company to drill in the contentious locations and encourage the British government to secure the disputed territory for Saraifa. (What a silly plan.) But it has completely failed: Gorde, the head of the oil company has expressly banned the drilling, war with the men of Hadd now looks inevitable, and the British government is (wisely) refusing to get involved – the exact opposite of everything David hoped for.
Khalid tells Grant he must go on this mission to find David and a) bring him back to be reunited with his father, to persuade him to call off the drilling b) then go to the British Political representative in Bahrain and beg for men and guns to defend Saraifa from the men of Hadd and their allies.
— Innes’ description of Grant’s journey through the desert and then across the treacherous quagmire of Umm al Samim is powerfully evocative. Around this stage of the book the longeurs which had dogged Grant’s quest for David begin to be replaced by more frequent and vivid descriptions of the desert, the harshness of bedouin life, a mounting sense of violence and impending tragedy.
Disaster
And then – very quickly, in the space of twenty pages – the situation and mood are turned upside down. As David and Grant ride their slow camels back towards Saraifa they learn that the men of Hadd have already attacked the doomed oasis. First they find the neighbouring village, Dhaid, full of woebegone refugees cowering behind the walls. Then they come to Saraifa itself, where all the falajes have been blocked, there is no drinking water, and the desert sands are blowing freely across the date gardens.
They ride out to the first watering hole where they discover the wreckage of a battlefield. Here Khalid and his men were ambushed by the men of Hadd and massacred, rusty old rifles against modern automatic weapons. All the bodies have been half-eaten by hyenas. David finds Khalid’s body, buries it with tears in his eyes, then swears vengeance on the men of Hadd.
They ride on past scattered corpses and out into the desert until they come upon Whitaker who is setting up his mobile drilling at the contentious locations, regardless of the consequences. Grant witnesses the reunion between son and the father who thought he was dead, and it is not a happy one. David is mystified as to why Whitaker is bothering to drill at all since, in David’s mind, the drilling was always about generating oil revenue to pay to restore the falajas and save the oasis. He is appalled to realise that for Whitaker it is just about confirming his lifelong theory that the oil is here, and about money. He has done a deal with the Emir of Hadd, got his approval to drill, and will pay him a commission.
David, thirsting for revenge, begs his father for men to help him carry out an attack on Hadd but Whitaker (sensibly) refuses. Whitaker asks Grant to help him make David see sense. In his turn, David asks Grant to come with him and help with his attack. Almost without realising it, Grant agrees with the latter and, along with four Arabs, they set off on camel-back for Hadd. —More evocative descriptions of the desert by day and night. And an atmosphere of real threat and tension.
The small team arrive at Hadd by night. David blows up its three wells (ha! revenge for Saraifa!) then they climb the old fort which backs onto the town. The battle – or more accurately, siege – which forms the climax of the novel, has begun.
6. Fort Jebel al-Akhbar
By this stage the novel has become gripping. Maybe it’s the introductoin of the visceral excitement of war and bloodshed – but it’s also the sense that the various strands of the plot are reaching a climax: Grant’s long association with David, which gives their relationship its depth; and David’s enmity with his father; all overlaid by his thirst for revenge for the killing of Khalid and the strangling of Saraifa, the doomed oasis.
David, Grant and their Arabs hold out in the commanding tower for days. They snipe at anyone trying to fix the wells. They successfully repulse every attack, sometimes with grenades. Three Land Rovers arrive with boastful Arab warriors and they immediately destroy two of them.
Under cover of dark, David encourages Grant to escape, blacked out, dressed as a bedouin, hiding against rocks as another wave of attackers climb the hillside. Grant stumbles across the attackers’ camels, steals one and heads west in the hope of coming across the tracks to Whitaker’s camp. —More convincing, and terrifying, descriptions of the pitiless desert.
By fluke, Grant makes it to Whitaker’s camp and his news angers the old man: he has helped set the Emir against him just as his dreams of drilling were coming true. Whitaker is torn between grief at the inevitable death of his son and hatred of him for scuppering his lifelong ambition.
The incident has been reported and one Colonel George for the British Army drops by to ensure Whitaker and his men are alright. He is accompanied by Ruffini, the snooping Italian journalist Grant first met in Bahrain. Lucky. Grant briefs Ruffini who flies out with Colonel George and manages to smuggle the story out to the British press. The next day it is dominating the national papers and a question is asked of the Foreign Secretary in the House. David’s siege has become an international incident. Over the next few days David is cast, by a jingoistic press, as a national hero. Grant watches all these developments with amazement.
Colonel George had radioed one of his patrols, led by a Captain Berry, to collect Grant and take him back to Bahrain but they divert to the border with Hadd and then, after a few days, the fuss in the press not going away, they are ordered to proceed to Jebel al-Akhbar to broker a deal.
Captain Berry and Grant are given safe passage by the Emir up the hill to the fort and meet David, more dead than alive, wounded and parched with thirst. He refuses to leave. He doesn’t trust the Emir not to assassinate him, and he thinks with a few more days holdout the British government will be forced to intervene and save Saraifa. Berry and Grant leave him some water and bandages and return to keeping a watching brief with their platoon of troops on the Saraifa-Hadd border.
Next thing they see a posse of the Emir’s men ride by in the direction of Whitaker’s drilling – then several hours later, riding back with Whitaker. The Emir is forcing Whitaker to confront his son and make him surrender.
Hours later Berry and Grant and the men hear a single shot ring out from the distant hill. They receive radio instructions that the government is brokering David’s surrender and a helicopter flies into the mountain top to bring him out. Ruffini the journalist is there to record the scene as the semi-conscious David is brought down to Berry’s camp, just enough time to whisper hello to Grant, before being flown on to hospital in Bahrain.
The Emir rides out to the camp in the dignity and simplicity of bedouin dress on a camel and harangues the British troops: they care nothing for the deaths of innumerable Arabs, but maybe they will mind the death of a white man. And one of his Land Rovers roars up and deposits the body of Colonel Whitaker onto the sand, shot in the face.
Did David shoot him? Is he a national hero or a national disgrace? Ruffini promises to write up a version that the Emir’s men treacherously murdered Whitaker, and Grant is full of hope. But Whitaker’s old friend and sparring partner, Sir Philip, says it is Grant’s fault for smuggling David out here in the first place, a dockside water-rat, a criminal wanted by the police, a rough illegitimate boy who had vowed to kill his father, one of the finest Arabists of his generation, a legend in the Peninsula, and a hero. It is all Grant’s fault.
Which is true? Which version will prevail?
Back in court
And so the narrative returns to the opening scene, a court room where Grant has been called to give evidence for the prosecution against David Thomas. The preceding 300 pages amount to a summary of his evidence, what he saw and experienced and witnessed. What will the court decide…?
Innes’ ‘secrets’
The ‘secrets’ at the core of these Innes novels of the later 1950s are often pretty trivial:
- In The Wreck of The Mary Deare the crew were ordered to sink the ship as part of an insurance scam, but the captain managed to keep her afloat and beach her on rocks near the Scillies. That’s it. But it takes the narrator about 200 pages of painful obstructions and evasive conversations to prise this out of the ship’s captain.
- In The Land God Gave To Cain three engineers survive crash landing in the wilds of Labrador, where one goes mad and tries to kill the other two, one of whom just about survives, escapes and hushes it all up. The narrator, a radio ham in England, picks up a radio signal from the murderer, left out in the wastes, a week after he was officially dead – that’s the puzzle or mystery – and it takes him 200 pages of interviewing innumerable evasive and obstructive company officials and eyewitnesses before he gets to the (unsatisfyingly simple) truth.
Innes only manages to spin 200-page novels out of these thin scenarios by having everyone in them appear slow on the uptake and have long, fruitless conversations in which they refuse to ‘spit it out’. Everyone is evasive about everything. In the 1950s this might have passed for the creation of ‘pace, tension and intrigue’ but tastes have changed. We expect a modern thriller to be cleverer than the reader, to outwit us with multiple levels of deceit, layers of duplicity which are slowly peeled away to reveal something truly shocking or dazzling.
Instead, for the majority of this book, as in the previous two, I experienced a growing sense of frustration as every conversation consisted of evasions and hesitations. Not for any cunning and clever reasons but simply for Innes to create a false sense of tension and spin things out.
It’s made worse because the real explanation is obvious so early on in the novel – when David’s death is reported I thought it was a bit pat and convenient, so it came as no surprise 200 pages later to realise he isn’t dead at all. The only thing that puzzled me was, Why? And the revelation that it was a publicity stunt to push the company into signing a legal commitment to drill at the contentious locations just seems ludicrous, a ludicrous failure to understand how multinational oil companies work.
Evasions and frustrations
A classic example is the conversation between the solicitor Grant and David’s twin sister, Susan, out in Arabia. Almost every one of her replies for about five pages of dialogue is hesitant, evasive, reluctant – and, doubling the frustration, part of it is her recounting a conversation with her brother in which he had been hesitant and evasive.
But since we, the readers, know that the plot boils down to David and his father disobeying oil company policy and drilling for oil in a politically sensitive region, the evasions seem unnecessary, willed and wilful, only there to delay and retard the plot, to inject a factitious sense of intrigue into a situation which is relatively simple.
She paused there… ‘Dedicated to what?’ I asked… but she couldn’t tell me… she gave a slight shrug… she didn’t answer for a moment… she hesitated… She paused, at a loss for words… I asked her what it meant but all she said was… ‘I don’t know,’ she said… she didn’t answer for a while… she shrugged… ‘I don’t know’… She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, for I had to drag it out of her… She admitted it reluctantly… she hesitated.. ‘I can’t explain’… she couldn’t put it into words… ‘He wouldn’t tell me anything’… ‘Now?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know…’ she shook her head… she shrugged… ‘I don’t know…’ (pages 123-130)
Similarly, when Grant meets David, blackened and seared by six weeks hiding out in the desert, you’d have thought he’d be desperate to explain the situation and find out what’s happened in his absence. But the scene is marred by Innes’ characteristic slowness and evasiveness.
His voice faded and once more he was staring out into the void… He didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting there lost in thought… He said it with deep bitterness and afterward was silent for a long time… (pp.233-235)
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he replied tersely. And after that he sat for a long time without saying a word. (p.251)
If Raymond Chandler is the king of quickfire repartee, Innes is the master of long, slow, slack, evasive and frustratingly inconclusive dialogue. How I wish I had a pound for every time a character shrugs, or hesitates, or says ‘I don’t know’.
Shellfish
There’s a physical concomitant to these evasions which is the tendence of all the characters to perform the same psychological act of turning in on themselves, withdrawing from the conversation, or looking off into the distance. It’s something I noticed a lot in The Land God Gave To Cain and it’s here in spades. This would be fine if there was anything interesting they were pondering or looking at – but they aren’t.
He had withdrawn into his own thoughts. (p.178)
He didn’t say anything. He seemed suddenly to have withdrawn into himself. (p.181)
Colour
On the other hand, Innes is good at local colour. As the plot becomes more Arab, as the westerners get left behind and Grant enters the world of the desert Arabs, the ‘plot’ may be spurious, but the text of the novel really picks up pace and intensity from Innes’ vivid description of Arab clothes and appearances, speech and customs, and the changing face of the vast and terrifying desert.
We travelled all that night without a break. The moon turned the desert to a bleak, bone white, and in the early hours a mist came up and it was cold. By then I was too tired to care where I was going and only the pain of the saddle chafing the inside of my thighs, the ache of unaccustomed muscles, kept me awake. The dawn brought a searing wind that whipped the mist aside and flung a moving cloud of sand in our faces. Lightning flashed in the gloom behind us, but no rain fell – just the wind and the driving sand particles. (p.225)
His prose is clear and functional, isn’t it? Devoid of the class-conscious grammatical correctness of Graham Greene’s prose, it is lucid and easy to read. There are no obstacles to quick comprehension and it is this ease of absorption, it is the speed you can read it at, which compensates, especially in the final section of the novel, for the frustrations of the first half of the plot.
As you put the book down it is the quick vivid descriptions of battle in the desert, along with the gathering sense of danger as Grant gets sucked into the siege on the hill, which ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the earlier human interactions, so that overall I found it a rewarding, memorable and moving book. But I can see why nobody tried to make it into a film. And also why, like so many other Innes books, it is now largely unread.
Related links
- Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
- Independent obituary
- New York Times obituary
- Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website
Books & Boots 