Doubleday £15 pp356

As I sit down to write, it has started to rain. Beyond my study window, the sun has vanished behind a gigantic black cloud and the street lights are still on at 10 in the morning. I’ve just put on a second sweater. There are few places on earth I’d rather be right now than in a sunny, secret garden in Morocco, surrounded by date palms and hibiscus flowers.

A couple of years ago, Tahir Shah, the travel author and documentary film-maker, faced a similarly gloomy day in London. Then his telephone rang. The mother of an old schoolfriend had heard that he wanted to move his young family out of England. Twenty-four hours later, Shah was in Casablanca, falling in love with — and about to buy — the Caliph’s House.

The property was exceptional — and a bargain to boot: a maze of interconnected rooms and secluded courtyards, mature walled gardens, an orange grove and a swimming pool. It was “a fantasy worthy of a far wealthier man than I”, writes Shah. There were only two problems with it: first, the remarkable state of ruin — walls discoloured with algae, birds nesting in lamps, flooded bedrooms; second, the fact that it was haunted by jinn.

Many Muslims believe that when God created mankind from clay, He fashioned jinn — or genies — from fire. The existence of these evil spooks is accepted by everyone in Morocco. Everyone, that is, except Shah. Unfortunately for him, there seemed to be dozens of them — perhaps even hundreds — in the building. And they all wanted him and his family out.

The Caliph’s House is a story of home-ownership abroad, of wrecking-crew builders, haunted nights, hidden rooms, stolen title deeds and a plague of bees. Shah discovers how to hire cooks, fire an architect and bail builders out of jail. He appeases gangsters and aspires to be patient. “Whenever I ran through the house raving,” he writes of the apparent inability of Moroccan workmen to finish any job, “the master craftsmen would grin broadly and exclaim that only Allah was complete.”

The book romps between western scepticism and Casablancan superstition. Shah assails mystic tradition on one hand, and then, on the other, pricks a finger and bleeds into a lavatory to please the jinn. He buys a tortoise with divine spirit. He learns to guard against house fires by hanging a salted frog outside the front door. The conclusion is clamorous and hilarious; he employs 24 exorcists, marshalled by a pot-smoking pimp in a gold lamé turban and accompanied by a huge goat with good karma, to rid his house of evil.

Reading about restoring houses overseas can be as tedious as watching Farrow & Ball paint dry. The formula is nothing new. Since Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence hogged the bestseller lists in the 1980s, many others have sought to combine their variable writing talents with their escapist dreams. Yet I can’t fault this joyful and resplendent addition to the genre. Shah writes without artifice or condescension. His language is fluent and direct. His characters leap off the page (especially Zohra, who believes that a 100ft tall giant sits on her left shoulder). I couldn’t put the book down.

Beyond the terracotta tiles and tagines, The Caliph’s House also describes a journey of self- discovery. Shah’s earliest memories are of the great walled city of Fez and its “cobbled lanes no wider than a barrel’s length, dimly lit and bewitching”. Years before, his father had driven him and his siblings here to bring colour to their “sanitised English childhood”. Shah returns to relive those memories, to introduce his own children to a place of astonishing intensity and to track down his grandfather who lived in Tangier at the end of his life.

Early in Shah’s stay, an old man in a pale jellaba looks into his face and sees “a sheet of white paper. There is no writing upon it, nothing at all. The paper has just been made. It’s new. There’s great hope for it. A beautiful poem could be written on it — something inspiring, something wonderful...But the great shame is that the sheet of paper will never know beauty. Why? Because it doesn’t believe”.

Then, over the course of a year, the Caliph’s house changes the way in which Shah perceives the world. He starts to question empirical scientific ideals, and appreciates the power of supernatural forces. He understands that in the West most people are “driven on by an extreme form of guilt — if you are not seen to be working like a dog, you’re perceived as being slothful”.

He realises that living in a small flat in London has restrained his thoughts. Now, under the vast African sky, he starts “to plan enormous expeditions, to dream up subjects for obscure encyclopedia to write”. He sheds the cosy European sense of security, “the safety net that trapped us and held us back”, and begins to believe in the unseen.

Given the breadth and power of his work to date, blazing his individual trail from sorcery to a lost Inca city by way of King Solomon’s mines, I can’t imagine where in the world Shah will travel now. I await his next book with anticipation, ready to be transported again.

Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India will be published by Viking in June.

The Caliph’s House is available at the Books First price of £13.50 on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

source : timesonline.co.uk