The Gabriel Hounds

The Gabriel Hounds
by Mary Stewart


Blurb:

It's all a grand adventure when English Christy Mansel unexpectedly runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus. And being young, rich, impetuous, and used to doing whatever they please, they decide to barge in uninvited on their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet— despite a long-standing family rule strictly forbidding unannounced visits. Because when the Gabriel hounds run howling over the crumbling palace of Der Ibrahim in the Lebanon, someone will shortly die.

A strange new world awaits Charles and Christy beyond the gates of Dar Ibrahim— "Lady Harriet's" ancient, crumbling palace in High Lebanon— where a physician is always in residence and a handful of Arab servants attends to the odd old woman's every need. But there is a very good— very sinister— reason why guests are not welcome at Dar Ibrahim. And the young cousins are about to discover that, as difficult as it is to break into the dark, imposing edifice, it may prove even harder still to escape.

My Reaction:
Either I managed to read the best of Mary Stewart's romantic suspense first, leaving only the "lesser" ones still to read, or my tastes have changed since I started them.  In any case, I seem not to have enjoyed the last two or three as much as I'd hoped or expected.

First, the positives:
--Stewart writes a beautiful, vivid setting. 
--There was a brief period in the middle of the book when I thought things were about to get interesting... (And then it went in a different direction, and honestly, I was disappointed, even if this is the "positive" section of the review!)
--...Um... There were some cute dogs?  What else?  Not much comes to mind, I'm afraid!

The negatives, now...
--The setting isn't my cup of tea, I'm afraid, though the seraglio garden sounded beautiful.
--I tend not to get too bothered about old-fashioned ideas in older books, but this one irritated me in some of its attitudes toward women and "natives". 
--For most of the book, the story moved at a snail's pace. 
--The hero's and heroine's main personality traits seemed to be that they were rich, privileged, and sometimes a bit obnoxious.  Christy was much more annoying than Charles, but he didn't even feel like a real person, with his affected way of talking...  I'm not sure which is worse!
--Christy is... well, she's either naive or just a bit dim. And she always seems to need rescuing!
--There are some remarkable coincidences and outlandish, unlikely occurrences.  I can overlook those if the book creates enough of a feeling of goodwill to compensate, but in this case, that goodwill is somewhat lacking.  It just comes across as lazy writing.
--The title has almost nothing to do with the book!  Annoying.

And then there's this one, which deserves its own paragraph... I don't usually have a problem with "cousin romances" in older books.  It just doesn't bother me.  However, this one was a huge turn-off for a number of reasons.  First, the fact that "they" changed it from first cousins to second cousins for the American version makes the whole thing seem a bit dirty!  Second, the cousins look too much alike (and their fathers were identical twins?!?!). Third, the cousins seem to have been raised almost as siblings-- and refer repeatedly to have bathed together as children and... "played doctor" when they were young (unless my crazy brain just manufactured that on its own, which I almost hope is what happened, rather than for it to have been in the book... but here it is: "I had discussed sex with him at the age when we had no physical secrets from one another...").  I'm sorry, but that's gross. It's almost as if it's not enough that they were first cousins (with identical twin fathers?!?!); Stewart had to push the envelope even further by making them essentially siblings with a strong family resemblance and a weird habit of reminiscing over the shared baths of their childhoods.  Yeah, sorry, but that's gross. Why put that in a romance novel?!  Why?!  She didn't have to do that, so the only conclusion I can come to is that she thought it was... cute, or even sexy.  (Blurgh.)

Sadly, the novel simply didn't do it for me.  There were some beautiful descriptions, and it was interesting to see a severe 1960s take on "hashish", given the desire of so many to normalize it, these days-- but the positives were outweighed by the negatives listed above (and a spoilerish thing that I'll put down at the bottom of the post behind a warning).  I'm not sure how many of Stewart's "suspenseful romances" I've yet to read, but I hope they'll be stronger than this one was!



Okay, here's the spoilerish thing...

Avert thy eyes, lest thou be spoilt!

Ugh.  Did that idiot Christy actually suggest using one of the salukis as a guinea pig to determine whether or not the soup was poisoned?!  Yeah, I get that she was trying to prevent the other woman from being used as a test subject, but why suggest giving it to the dogs instead?!

And while I'm on a roll, I was similarly displeased when Christy and Charles only cared about saving the poor dog at the end of the book when they realized it was the Great-Aunt's dog.  The poor dog would've needed their help in any case, but they were just going to leave it there until they recognized its name on the collar.  I found that obnoxious, too.  (But admittedly, I was kind of disgusted with the whole family, by that point, so I'm probably not being fair on this point.)

...Oh, and what was with that weird bit at the end where Christy couldn't tell the difference between her own father and her uncle?!  I know they're identical twins, but it's her father, and adult twins aren't usually that indistinguishable, are they?  By that age, they usually have some fairly telltale differences that family members should easily recognize!  I just thought that was (extremely) strange.