In Depth
From Morocco with love
04.12.07 Benedicte Page
As flexible working arrangements go, Jane Johnson's must count as one of the most unusual ever seen in publishing. While continuing her role at HarperCollins as publishing director for HarperFiction, running the Voyager fantasy list and editing bestselling authors such as Sam Bourne and Michael Marshall Smith, Johnson now spends much of the year in a remote Berber village in the foothills of the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco, keeping in touch with colleagues, authors and agents via broadband.
This remarkable turnaround is the result of a life-changing visit Johnson made to the country three years ago to research her new book (Crossed Bones, Viking, April). The novel, a women's adventure story in the vein of Labyrinth which has been sold into 17 countries, is based on a true story: the abduction of 60 Cornish men and women from a church in 1625 during a raid by the "Sallee Rovers"—Barbary pirates from the north African coast who, in the 17th century, took large numbers of Europeans, including British men and women, from coastal villages to be sold as slaves.
Johnson had been inspired by a legend in her own Cornish family about an ancestor who had been abducted in a pirate raid, and she went to Morocco to get background material for her story. Deciding to combine the research trip with her longstanding hobby, rock-climbing, Johnson and a friend headed down to the southern Moroccan village of Tafraout. On her first night there, they went to a restaurant, where the door was opened by a Berber "with this amazing, hawkish face", as Johnson describes it. "I cast him in the novel immediately. He had tremendous charisma." His name was Abdel, and although Johnson's French was poor, and his English was worse, "he was tremendously knowledgeable about the area and we were communicating a lot".
But the rock-climbing venture in Tafraout came close to disaster. An ambitious attempt on a perilous stretch of rockface turned to a mudbath by heavy rain ended with Johnson and her climbing partner stranded after dark, thinly dressed and in freezing temperatures, with no way down the rockface until dawn, and at serious risk of exposure.
It was a long, dark night of the soul, Johnson explains: "It started to rain at dawn, and that was the moment I thought I was really going to die. But by that time I'd decided to change everything: I was going to go part-time at HarperCollins, I was going to write the damn book. But the most important thing I had decided to do was to talk to this extraordinary man I had met in the restaurant and find out just why I couldn't stop thinking about him when I'd only met him two days before."
Eventually the climbers managed to abseil to safety, and the whole of Tafraout celebrated their return. "The next day Abdel took me aside and put a Tuareg ring on my finger, shaped like a tent, and said: 'That's to make sure you are safe and never get into a situation like that again.' It was an intensely romantic moment. I got on the flight back later that day and my friend was chuckling gleefully, saying: 'You know that means you're now his third wife.' But then we started a very old-fashioned courtship, over the phone."
Things went from strength to strength between the couple and, in the summer of 2005, Johnson went to HarperCollins m.d. Amanda Ridout to resign from her post, so that she could be with Abdel in Morocco. "She was amazing about the whole thing. She said: 'We can't have that, we'll work something out.' "
Johnson's Berber marriage has greatly affected the plot of Crossed Bones, in which 19-year-old Cornish girl Catherine Treganna is abducted and taken off to slavery at the home of a Barbary pirate, but finds her experiences in her new Islamic home very far from the horror story she was expecting.
Johnson sees the historical view of the Barbary pirates as barbaric raiders dragging Cornish women off to the harem as one-sided: "The Brits have been pirating all over the place, and of course we were participating in the slave trade in a huge way. What happened was that all the Moors in Spain were thrown out by Philip III, although they'd been there for hundreds of years and formed the backbone of Spanish culture. Of course they had all their goods repossessed. So they ended up on the north African coast, a lot of them in the city of Sale, which is now Rabat, with no money and no way of making a living. So they set about raiding, taking ships and cargoes, and then worked out it was more profitable to take crew. They were driven by fury and a real determination to avenge what was happening to them."
Johnson describes Morocco as "such an extraordinary place to visit. I think everyone should go, to see what a liberal Islamic country can be like. We all go with our preconceptions: it has been very educational to me that even I, who am quite a liberal person, have my own preconceptions about so much of this culture. People have been lovely to me, very warm and welcoming, it's a very inclusive culture and very caring of its people."
The dialogue between Islamic and western cultures is "all so new still to us, and all so relevant. We still have this friction and tension between the two cultures, both sides refusing to understand properly the other, and using it as an excuse for conflict. Yet at the heart of each, there is so much similarity." Something which, among the Berbers of the Anti-Atlas, Jane Johnson is continuing to learn.
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