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What Will Survive starts deceptively, with Joan Smith enjoying herself by creating a banal interview with a fashion model, whose social commitment keeps breaking through the crass Hello-style questions. The reader is then taken to a pungently realised Middle East with Aisha, the model, adrift in an unsettling environment, where people speak very little English, and many of whom she meets have their own agendas. As with Diana, Princess of Wales (whose shade haunts the book), Aisha's concern is with land mines, and the casual destruction of innocent lives is clearly a key concern of both the character and her author (Aisha, like Diana, is to die violently: not in the pleasure haunts of Paris, but driving though the dangerous terrain that Diana had earlier ventured into). Aisha, in the same fashion as her similarly beautiful royal doppelganger, is to become a posthumous source of curiosity; the circumstances of her death are investigated by a reporter, Amanda, whose quest has the dark compulsiveness of the author's crime novels. As in that genre, Smith is fully aware just how much information can be paid out - and at what intervals -- to the reader. And as the revelations (personal and political) accrue, a complex and troubling picture of the clash of civilisations and cultures (a favourite theme of Smith as a newspaper columnist) is interrogated with total rigour. And as always with Joan Smith, whatever the sexual politics of the novel, male characters (such as the Tory MP Stephen Massinger, who becomes involved with Aisha) are as strongly drawn as her beleaguered female protagonists, though a far less sympathetic eye is cast over them. --Barry Forshaw
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