The Forgiven

The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne

Blog written by Sarah

The Forgiven is Lawrence Osborne's story of drama and debauchery among wealthy westerners in Morocco as they attend a hedonistic party while the local servants look on in increasing despair.   To quote Jane Austen, “Everything happens at parties.”

The story slowly simmers as we are taken on a journey into the dessert of Morocco.

Osborne has a keen and cruel eye when it comes to the complexities that make up his characters, laying bare their morals and their failures to truly know themselves.

Throughout this story Osborne forces us to walk the hire-wire between several juxtapositions; post-colonial angst of the privileged westerners and the local Moroccans; the deteriorating relationship of the bad tempered Doctor David Henninger and his wife and author, Jo; the escalating tension between employer and employee, rich and poor as the workers look on at the debauched revellers and the repercussions of David’s earlier actions.

At the start of his journey the main protagonist David Henninger is a smug, alcoholic doctor, hateful and unlikeable.  He is objectively failing in his profession, evidenced by malpractice.  Despite, or more likely because of his privileged schooling and upbringing, he is utterly unable to see anything outside of his own frame of reference; though it is clear that neither are none of his other party-goers.  By the end of the story, despite all that happens to and around him, he singularly fails to change in any discernible way.

Whilst the group generally found the book not “enjoyable” as such, it did generate a long and interesting discussion; we largely agreed that the plot, whilst dark and complex in nature, was woven together very tightly and we found its ending satisfying,

This plot was intriguing to us, with the complex relationships between the characters all seemingly searching for the same thing; forgiveness.  However, this forgiveness was ultimately never given.  The characters themselves, though in some cases unlikeable and sharing a common inability to know themselves were generally very rich and rewarding to explore.

Given its exotic location the book unsurprisingly highlights the cultural contrast between the Western attitudes and hedonistic tenancies of the party-goers, and the local Islamic culture, throwing up plenty of provocative subjects for debate.

We enjoyed the writer’s description of how he based it on a true story, his own experiences of being in places like these and never really being sure of the shifting ground and dynamics between him and the indigenous population.  We felt it could be made in to a movie, with it’s realism and darkness would play well as film noir. Reading Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky might be an excellent companion to The Forgiven.


Avg rating – 7.5

Our next book is Just Kids by Patti Smith and we will be meeting at Robyn's on August 25th.