LIT BY the sunshine of its tropical setting, Leila is a charming love story, the adventure of a Scottish man abroad and a meditation on prejudice, hypocrisy and the abuse of political power. Leila made me understand racism, not the racism of social discrimination or violence but the self-conscious awareness, sometimes exciting and sometimes distancing, of another’s colour of skin – a fascination bordering on dislike of difference and how aversion could lie underneath the surface of love. Robin Jenkins understood this weakness, indeed saw it compassionately as a human flaw and in writing about British expatriates in the 1950s, he was not held back by present-day political correctness.
Leila is sincere and free of artifice. It was my first introduction to an author whose novels, in hindsight, made me feel welcome in Scotland. Robin Jenkins understood people’s need to be good and their frustrated need to strain themselves towards idealism. His characters would rebel or set themselves apart from their community but – and that was one of the most moving aspects of his work – they would find themselves, winners or losers, tainted by these same norms and prejudices they were fighting. Ambivalence haunts a Robin Jenkins’ novel and gives it its depth. Social interdependence and community adherence give it a universal appeal. At the same time, his novels are distinctly Scottish with a strong sense of national identity and a rich ease with Scottish culture and language. My enthusiasm for Leila led me to read every Robin Jenkins novel I could find but Leila still remains a favourite because it is one of his most solid and mature works and it has the most irresistible setting.
The novel is set on the paradisiacal island of Savu in the South China Sea where bougainvillea and palm trees flourish. The Scottish protagonist, Andrew Sandilands, is described by his fellow British expats as a ‘lucky bugger’. His job is more lucrative than theirs, his home grander, for he is the principal of the teachers’ training college – ‘a cushy job if ever there was one. Hard-working, well-behaved students, not like the louts at home.’ In addition Andrew is popular with the ladies, especially chief nurse Jean who is determined to marry him and install him in a semi-detached villa in Morningside. He is the six times champion of the golf club and as holder of the course record, he is regularly invited to play golf with the Sultan. But this is a Jenkins novel, where such luck must be challenged by trials and where such favours are gripped in the cold hand of reality.
For Andrew the challenge comes in the form of the stunning sophisticated Leila, a local lawyer and progressive politician. Leila is Malay but her late mother was Scottish. She is a Christian in a Muslim country, a fact which is mentioned early in the novel and seems to be a deliberate and wise choice of Jenkins to avoid the complications of a Muslim/Christian relationship as well as convincingly bringing Leila closer to Andrew and his community. (Although Leila is an Arab name, it is not necessarily a Muslim one.) Leila, therefore, is a product of two cultures. She is comfortable wearing traditional clothes and at other times Western clothes. She speaks several languages and moves comfortably between worlds. As a chaste Eastern woman, she expects Andrew to marry her. As a confident, unconventional woman she announces their engagement in public even before Andrew has proposed.
It is at this point that the most fascinating and poignant aspect of the novel is played out – Andrew’s adoration and at the same time his revulsion of Leila.
Andrew’s mother had from his infancy filled him with prejudices, most of them out of the Bible, the kind so hard to get rid of. He hated colour prejudice and knew all the arguments against it and yet he suffered from it. So did all mankind, but that was no excuse. Surely Leila could cure him.
Time and again, Andrew wonders if he were to walk with Leila by his side in the streets of Edinburgh, would he be pitied or envied? He is dismayed when Leila asserts their relationship in front of the British community. He glows with pride that Leila finds him attractive, at the same time he is full of self-disgust. He is obsessed with her shade of colour, how a tiny black mole on her neck makes her skin look ‘quite light’ and he needs to reassure himself that she is ‘far from black’. Another writer would have positioned Andrew as an inspired hero battling his narrow-minded community. Instead, and this is the greatest strength of the novel, we are presented with the average decent human being: ‘In spite of his years abroad his was a stay-at-home temperament.’ He is someone who would rather not have fallen in love with the wrong woman.
Leila’s role as a politician, and the part she plays in introducing democracy to Savu, serves as the plot for this fast-paced novel. Andrew, like the rest of the British community, is not enthusiastic about change in Savu. He is prepared to agree that the Sultan, his golfing partner, is just and benevolent and that even forming political parties is a source of division. For Andrew, his students in the college and the people of Savu are ‘simple souls who ought not to be bothered by politicians. They did not want power, even the infinitesimal part represented by the casting of a vote every four or five years.’ When Leila is delighted by the announcement that there will be elections and that there will be for the first time a Parliament, Andrew can barely hide his scepticism. Her response is expected and characteristic: ‘You underestimate the people of Savu. They are proud of their country. They want it to be their country, not the Sultan’s only.’ As events unfold, Andrew realises that he underestimated his students, they are not so timid or so content after all and they are capable of rebellion. And Leila too realises that Andrew’s interpretation of the Sultan’s permission to hold elections is correct: ‘His Highness must be very confident his side will win. He’ll get the credit of being democratic without the pain of having to give up power.’ When Leila’s party shockingly wins the most votes, the Sultan’s retribution is fierce. He is backed by the British Resident and when reinforcements are flown in they are, ironically, Scottish soldiers from Cyprus.
Leila is also a novel of adventure that belongs to the British tradition of ‘the exotic’ or the Englishman abroad (here assertively the Scotsman). Jenkins follows in the footsteps of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad in writing about a foreign location for an audience in Britain. Like those writers, he questions the stereotype of the enlightened Western expert and the uncivilised primitive native but he is more sympathetic than Greene and more accessible than Conrad. In this novel of exile, home is not as far as geography would have us believe. Andrew’s Scotland is always around the corner; in the character of Jean and her projections of how well-off they would be back home in Edinburgh, and in the Glasgow soldier who guards the British Residency and says to Andrew, ‘I heard on the wireless it’s snawing in Scotland . . . but whit wouldnae I gie to be walking doon Sauchiehall Street wi’ my muffler up ower my ears.’
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When I met Robin Jenkins at a reading he gave in 1997 at Aberdeen Central Library, I told him how in some ways Leila reminded me of the British and American expatriate community of Khartoum in the 1970s – the exclusive but sometimes boring lifestyle; people thrown together haphazardly yet finding themselves a close-knit community. Although, as he said, the novel was inspired by his years teaching English in Sabah, Borneo, I could imagine the same story set in other oil-rich parts of the world where there was a heavy reliance on Western expertise. Substitute the Sultan for a sheikh and the Far East for the Arabian Gulf and we could, perhaps, be in modern-day Dubai, Qatar or Bahrain.
In person Jenkins was like his novels: accessible, quick, honest and surprising. Commenting on the novel I had picked up and was asking him to sign, he said that if he had to choose a favourite among his own novels it would be this one – A Would-be Saint. Written a good twenty years before Leila, it tells the story of a young Scottish man Gavin Hamilton, a talented footballer with a promising future whose opposition to violence on the football field sets him apart from his friends. Ultimately, like Jenkins himself, who spent 1940 to 1946 working for the forestry service in Argyll, Gavin registers as a conscientious objector at the outset of the Second World War. Andrew, too, can be seen as a conscientious objector taking a lonely stand against the legacy of imperialism. Yet Leila is not weighed down by seriousness; even as the tragedy unfolds, Robin Jenkins never loses touch with the absurdity and luxury of the expat lifestyle. The result is a vivid and memorable novel in which prejudice is presented as a human flaw that can be cured, as Leila demonstrates, with forgiveness and compassion.
Leila Aboulela
Abu Dhabi, 2007