Tangerine

Morocco was mine. And it could be, I reasoned. After all, what did I have to return to? A damp, shared room on the wrong side of New York? Endless days spent typing up other writers' manuscripts? Here I could finally write something of my own, put pen to paper as I had always dreamed of during college – as Alice and I had dreamed, together. And if that meant making Morocco my own, I was prepared to do just that. 

I was a Tangerine now, after all.

Tangerine starts off with much promise – a prologue that throws you off balance, followed by a plunge into bustling and blistering Tangier – and with the perspective alternating between that of two women (former roommates at Bennington College in Vermont, and you know what they say about Bennington girls...no really, what do they say?) who each suffer mental frailties, there was enough mystery and enough suspense to hook me from the beginning: Is Alice delusional or is Lucy gaslighting her? With the shifts in perspective, and neither of the women betraying the truth in their innermost thoughts, I thought that author Christine Mangan did a really fine job of creating suspense and uncertainty; just what did happen the night of the incident, the accident, the event that caused the rift between the two former friends? And why is Lucy showing up on Alice's doorstep in Tangier as though nothing happened? I totally bought into all of this. But about halfway through the book, Mangan answers these questions all at once, and while twisty and terrible things continue to happen, the real foundational suspense is drained from the story and it meanders ahead to one of several plausible conclusions. I was entertained for the most part, but not blown away.

I paused, looking out at the blue merging of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and I wondered if there was a word for it, a name, a title, to indicate this strange layering that seemed to be commonplace in Tangier, where everything was something else first, and nothing was ever entirely one thing.

Tangerine is set in the 1950s – I love that cover photo, credited as having been taken in Morocco in 1953 – and Alice has been brought to Tangier by her newlywed husband, John; a moneyless Brit from a good family (happily, rich Brit Alice will be coming into her Trust soon), and he is up to a bit of cloak and dagger work for the Home Office in the runup to Moroccan Independence. There is frequent mention of the heat and the dust, the cobblestones and the syrupy mint tea, but truly, so much more could have been made of the setting and the political moment – Morocco is in the background, but this story could have been set anywhere. In addition to the mysterious history between the two women – which is doled out nicely as each of them remembers their time together at college; sometimes not remembering events quite the same way – there are frequent mistaken identities, the giving of false names, and people who never state their names at all (was that Joseph or Youssef?); it could be hard to get your story straight in a place “where everything was something else first, and nothing was ever entirely one thing”. But ultimately, all this confusion feels manufactured: you don't get to the end and say, “Oh, right, because back there she said...” since you recognise the misdirection in the moment.

The feelings I had felt toward Lucy, I often thought, were something like this – something sharper than a normal friendship, something that I felt threatened to overwhelm and, quite possibly, destroy. There were moments when I had thought that I did not so much as want her, as I wanted to be her.

The prose was fine, but there were some choices that bugged me – I didn't like that Alice's father and her husband both called her “Alice in Wonderland” at some point, and that she later noted Lucy's “Cheshire grin”. And I certainly didn't like the number of times that Mangan wrote something like (I didn't mark the exact quotes) “if they were characters in a mystery novel they would have” or “like something out of a B grade detective movie”; nuh uh. Overall, though, I was entertained and remained interested enough in the plot to see how Mangan would tie it all up – this just wasn't the literary thriller I had somehow expected.