This intriguing short novel is a fictional reconstruction of the story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. In contrast to the histrionics which this genre of Biblical reanimation tends to produce, this is a compact and spare account of wandering and wondering. For here there are no heroes: Moses emerges in the midst of rumours which say that he has killed an Egyptian and is fleeing retribution, that he has both a Hebrew and an Egyptian heart, and that he is talking about return to the Ancestral Land. The Hebrews gathered in their oasis camps tolerate this madness because they all knew his mother, just an ordinary woman like any other... To make matters cloudier still, Moses reverts to speaking his native Egyptian, much to the puzzlement of the masses who are now vacantly gathering around him: imagine the confusion, a leader and a saviour talking to one in a language one does not understand.

If Moses is an unlikely leader, the Hebrews are an unlikely people: they spend generation after generation aimlessly in the desert, such that; ’like doorless and windowless houses, they had no other memories’. We are not in the grip of a mesmerising force felt by all, and the triumphant fulfilment of a desire or a will, but at best an inexplicable doggedness. Even Moses striking the rock with his staff and bringing forth water for his parched flock is viewed from the perspective of two mothers whose babies have just died of thirst anyway, and who are not impressed.

The Hebrews’ tenacity is partly due to ignorance and lack of imagination (at many points the Hebrews could have set their course out of the desert) but also due to an ill-defined sense that they are doing the right thing, submitting to the commandments (all we hear about the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai is that Moses goes missing for a few days); why not, after all... As they approach the Ancestral Land, they feel themselves to be in the presence of ’someone smiling and forbearing who expected something... without... knowing what it was’.

The novella gently demystifies the role of leadership, putting forward a model of ’leader of a people’ which does not correspond to the troubling figure of ultimate authority we have come to be suspicious of. With respect to that model, Moses fails on most accounts; he’s awful at public relations, at once impatient and distant, ’grim and remote’; bad on communication (long unexplained absences); bad on prioritising (in camp he spends all his time listening to his followers’ thoughts and complaints until Joshua sets up guard outside the tent to fend people off); he has no charisma and no clear aims and objectives.

If hero there is, it is a minor character called Eshkar. Eshkar was born in secret, like all the children of the enslaved Hebrews, who were forbidden to have children, and he keeps his distance from the camp; he doesn’t live in the family tent but strays far away to graze his sheep while always somehow coming across the wanderers in the desert again at pivotal points. He wants nothing to do with God, yet even he is gripped by a restless new energy as the banks of the Jordan loom into sight... .

Quietly haunting, unpretentious and interestingly unheroic, this is a lyrical book with a fine narrative momentum, as well as being a fascinating reworking of an important story.

’A smell of roast meat, of blood, of spilled beverage, and of date honey hung in the swiftly darkening air. The trampled, muddy clay paths of the camp glittered in the sunset, and later in the flickering light of the torches, with a gross, dark, bloody sheen. It was almost as if the quick of life itself, now shamelessly exposed for all to see, were being readied for transfer to some other place: the utensils of women thrown about out-of-doors, the now useless guts of sheep, the chamber pots and slop bowls, broken shards, the bare frame of a spinning wheel that never would spin again.

With the first stars, the bonfires leaped higher.’ p18’