Nile Shadows Revisited

Our good friend Anne Sydenham, who runs the wonderful Jerusalem Dreaming site, devoted to the works of Edward Whittemore, has been re-reading his Nile Shadows and shares her thoughts on her blog.The thing about both Nile Shadows and Jericho Mosaic, the last two books in the Jerusalem Quartet, is that they're novels that do not depend on a sense of adventure the way Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker do. There's no decades-long poker game for control of the Holy City. There's no larger-than-life English explorer Strongbow, except in abstract or memory. These last two books are, in a sense, about the transition of the Middle East and of the characters into the present-day. I still find parts of Nile Shadows and Jericho Mosaic very exciting in a traditional sense, but the percentages are inverted. They're both quieter novels, and you have to be prepared for that in order to enjoy them. I feel they're very much the equal of the other books in the series, in their way.Nile Shadows I'll never forget because the first thirty to forty pages are a masterful, genius-level dissection of one particular event involving the iconic if not mythic Stern, who starts out as a peace-broker in the series and ends up as a gun-runner. From that beginning, Whittemore could have done anything and I would have followed him.If you haven't read them, here's my essay on The Quartet and my review of the precursor novel, Quin's Shanghai Circus. All of them are, I believe, in print through Old Earth Books, and available on Amazon.