The Fourth Queen

Synopsis
Helen Gloag leaves her small Scottish village for America, but her ship is captured by pirates and she ends up in the harem of the Moroccan emperor.

My thoughts
Debbie Taylor did a prodigious amount of research and it shows. She explains in the author's note that Helen Gloag was a real woman who did become a consort to the emperor of Morocco, but the story itself was a compilation of historical accounts of various similar kidnappings in the eighteenth century. (Apparently there were numerous fair-haired beauties who were captured at sea and taken to the emperor's harem.) Taylor invented her other main character, the dwarf Microphilus, who is the head of the emperor's household and who becomes smitten with Helen himself.

I couldn't help comparing this book to Empress Orchid, which I read a few months ago. Both feature a lot of scheming and focus on the jealousy and rivalries that sprout when you throw dozens of women together with only one man. I enjoyed The Fourth Queen more, simply because the narrative was a lot smoother. Somehow, Empress Orchid had to stop the action to explain court customs and international events, and The Fourth Queen did a better job integrating the explanations with the flow of the story. Some of this was because Helen was a complete outsider and everything was as new to her as it was to the reader, while Orchid was thrown into a new situation in her own world (but not a world a Western audience would implicitly understand). The Fourth Queen was also less concerned with politics and less prudish about sexual life of the harem. (Speaking of which, skinniness was considered a disadvantage in the Moroccan harem. That was a refreshing change.)

I enjoyed the fact that The Fourth Queen went beyond the typical fish-out-of-water struggles. Helen adjusts to life in the harem and gains the emperor's favor to become the titular fourth wife, but that's only the beginning of the story. The rest centers around a murder mystery, and then the plot thickens and there are two murder mysteries.

It's a wonderful premise, but one of Taylor's literary quirks drove me nuts. The chapters are written alternately from Helen's and Microphilus's views, which is a technique that I hate anyway because it leads to a lot of needless repetition as you see events from both characters' points of view. But Taylor makes it even more intolerable because Helen's chapters are written in the third person in the present tense and Microphilus's chapters are purportedly from his diaries and are written in the first person in the past tense. I just ... it made my head hurt, is all. (And now re-reading this review I see I've mixed past and present tenses, so I don't know what I'm complaining about really.)

The ending has a bit of choose-your-own-adventure flair to it. Helen and Microphilus each have a choice to make, but Taylor leaves you hanging. I didn't mind this; it left me free to end the story the way I wanted it to end.

Bottom line
It's an interesting piece of historical fiction about a place that doesn't generally get a lot of attention.

Fine print
The Fourth Queen, by Debbie Taylor
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.