Day of the Feast

Margaret Lane

This is the third one of Margaret Lane's only faintly connected (by an occasional character) novels with a Moroccan base and that crashing critical cliche about sights and sounds and smells could not be more deserved. Here the cities, Tangier and Fez, which are her setting and which she knows so well dominate and even displace her characters - this time not the well-to-do, protected, middle-aged English men and women of the earlier novels, but a shabbier group of derelicts and dilettantes. As the novel begins, it concerns, ostensibly, one Miles' mission to contact another young man on behalf of his mother. But before long Miles becomes very attracted to and concerned with Tavy, a girl now eighteen, living in a Berber household with her baby; she had run away three years before with an exploitative. unpredictable man of forty. Tavy, abused and neglected, retains a kind of natural innocence which lends a romantic spur to her redemption - but what will be best remembered are the crowded, fetid, noisy, redolent city scenes which should probably be read in color.