The Lady Travelers Guide to Deception with an Unlikely Earl

by Victoria Alexander

November 20, 2018 · HQN Books

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Have you ever felt like a book was fighting with you? I had such a hard time with my innocent-seeming paperback copy of Lady Traveller’s that you would have thought it was one of the feisty books in the Terry Pratchett universe that have to be chained to the shelves. It wouldn’t lie flat. It kept worming its way under couch cushions and blankets. Every time I picked it up I dropped it, and every time I dropped it my bookmark fell out.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and my struggles with the book as an object became symbolic of my struggles with its contents. One part of me liked this book very much. It fell short of perfection for reasons I’ll get into later, but it was entertaining and benefited from great characters and scene description. That part of me would give it a nice cosy B-.

However, another part of me felt that this story, and stories like it, demonstrate a colonialist viewpoint best left behind, or, at the very least, balanced by lots and lots of stories about Egypt from the points of view of Egyptians. I loved the celebration of scholarship in the book and of both fact and fiction, I loved the characters, and I liked the romance, but I can’t avoid the fact that this is YET ANOTHER story about white people who come to a land under British colonial rule and say, “Ah, how very exotic.” I liked the book and I found it frustrating in equal measure and at the same time. No wonder the book kept trying to escape.

Here’s the deal – Miss Sidney Althea Gordon Honeywell (!!!!!!!) is unmarried and lives with her three widowed aunts. Sidney has never been to Egypt, but using her grandmother’s diaries and her own research she creates a popular series about a woman who has adventures in Egypt. Although Sidney never says that the stories are true, the public assumes that they are.

Enter Harry Armstrong, who has actually been to Egypt. He located artifacts on behalf of the local Egyptian government and helped those artifacts stay in the country. Harry has written about Egypt in the most realistic of terms, but no one wants to read his stuff because he insists on total realism and is considered boring. Incidentally, through a quirk of inheritance, Harry is now the new Earl of Brenton, hence the “Unlikely Earl” of the book’s title. Anyway, Harry proclaims that Sidney is a fake and has never been to Egypt, so Sidney ends up going to Egypt with Harry, a reporter, and the three aunts. She has to fake her way around as though she’s actually been there.

If you are thinking, “What? None of this makes sense!” I can only say that Sidney vocally and fervently agrees, but the aunts bully her into the whole thing because all of them (the aunts plus Sidney) want to go to Egypt and the publisher is paying for the trip.

Once in Egypt, hilarity ensues as the aunts refuse to do anything they are supposed to do and Harry and Sidney become involved in the hunt for the lost city of Itjtawy. Frankly, I thought there would be more actual adventure in Egypt. A lot of it is just tourism (hilariously, the journalist who tags along says the same thing). However we do finally get to a point where Sidney is hiding artifacts in her bosom and a surprise villain springs out of nowhere and many surprises occur and also there is sand and a tomb.

When I view this book from the perspective I would have had ten or twenty years ago, I have few complaints. Harry is an Indiana Jones type who, unlike Indiana Jones, believes artifacts belong in the museums of their countries of origin. I never understood why it’s important to him to keep his Earldom a secret, but otherwise his character makes a fine transition from condescending and pedantic to supportive and appreciative. The romance is good and the aunts are amazing. The biggest problems with the story in terms of mechanics are the uneven pacing (slow, slow, SUPER FAST, over), the plot twists which come out of nowhere, and the manufactured conflicts.

Then there is my perspective, here and now. This book did not lure me in with false pretenses. I jumped at “English writer goes to Egypt to have adventures” like a fox jumps at a mouse. However, once the characters got to Egypt, I realized that over time my perspective has changed: I can no longer be contented with a story set in Egypt which is told entirely through a White perspective. There’s only one significant character in the book who is Egyptian, and he’s regulated to a purely supporting role. As I’ve gained a deeper understanding of history and representation, I find that the colonialist view of the world (“It’s so exotic! And all for my emotional, physical, and material benefit!”) that once provided me with entertainment instead now makes me cringe. It’s not that travel and adventure stories are bad. It’s just that these stories are so very limited when they focus entirely on Western, White characters. Having more Egyptian viewpoints would have been not only more appropriate, but would have made this a more interesting book.

They say you should review the book you have, not the book you want, but I want a British Empire-era story set in Egypt in which an Egyptian woman does Indiana Jones type stuff in disguise and she robs museums in other countries and returns the artifacts to Egypt, and/or she gets stuff from tombs and patiently explains that booby traps are a myth right before a bunch go off, and she makes sure the stuff stays in Egypt, and she has a romance with a British woman who came to Egypt to be married, as many did, and they team up, and the Egyptian woman has a pet snake, and she is the POV character (the woman, not the snake), and the British woman learns about how shitty colonialism is and they rob museums together. And also, there are aunts. Please, someone write this.

In the meantime, Lady Traveller isn’t bad. It’s just the same story from the same lens, one I didn’t realize I’d outgrown until I was pretty far into the story.