TANGIER Book Reviews

TANGIER by Angus Stewart Book Summary

‘Highly personal. Enormously readable. Intense love shines through.’ Peter Burton - Gay News
‘Closely observed. Sensitive. Highly entertaining.’ Oxford Times

Stewart arrived in Tangier aged 24 living among the free-thinking Anglo/American crowd – writers and artists such as Paul Bowles, Alan Sillitoe, Tennessee Williams, Alec Waugh, William Burroughs, Gavin Maxwell, Francis Bacon, Joe Orton.
His first, ground-breaking novel, Sandel, appeared seven years into the experience. Now he discards the cloak of fiction and in Tangier speaks from the heart as much about himself as the city of his inspiration.
Closely observed, sharply written, entertaining and often wryly funny, here is a young writer immersed in a city of magic where ‘things happen’ – a city of friendship, cheap wine, kif and guilt-free Mediterranean sex where Stewart glimpses what it means to reject western society’s anxiety mechanisms and live simply in the eternal present. 
‘Stewart certainly recreates the sights and sounds of Tangier,’ wrote the gay writer and publisher Peter Burton. ‘It is a book rich in observation – but most often about young Moroccan boys. Perhaps the longest section in the book is the chapter about Meti, a boy Stewart met on a rainy night, took back to his small apartment where “Meti splashed in the bath, ate a large meal, and stayed four years”. Meti is but one of the boys whose presence brighten the pages of Tangier. Mr Stewart is at his best – as readers of Sandel will remember – when writing of these boys.’
These boys bring Stewart what he wants, an ability to get outside himself and just be. They take him into their homes, into their families to meet their parents and siblings. And he takes them into his heart, daring to look into the very soul of the Tanjaouine, longing to define that something which they have and we in the West have lost.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angus Stewart was born in 1936, the son of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, the novelist and Oxford academic who wrote bestselling crime fiction as Michael Innes. 
He was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset, and later at Christ Church Oxford, loosely disguised as St Cecilia’s in his first novel, Sandel. 
His first published story was ‘The Stile’ (1965), which appeared in the Faber anthology Writers 1964; it won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. But his breakthrough came with Sandel, written in 1968 in the wake of the Wolfenden Report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, when homosexuals were routinely put in prison. 
Stewart had a passion for boys, but wrote of same-sex love, not of sex. The New Statesman described the novel as ‘a controlled and beautifully written love story’. When the novel fell out of print, it developed a cult following and commanded a price of more than one thousand pounds a copy on Amazon.
In 1968 Stewart moved to Tangier in Morocco. His experiences there resulted in a second novel, Snow in Harvest (1969), which also has a love interest with a boy, and Tangier: A Writer’s Notebook (1977).
Between these two books, in 1972, Stewart published Sense & Inconsequence, a collection of nonsense verse with a foreword by family friend and poet W. H. Auden. It provides Meti’s real identity and makes other interesting points and references of interest to Stewart’s readers.

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TANGIER (Angus Stewart) Book Reviews 2024

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