Fiction: The skill and craft of Patricia Duncker's writing is plain in every chapter, but then she is the professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. It shows in the rigour of the writing, the conscious blending and bending of genres - English detective story, post-9/11 morality tale and comic travel romance, writes Kate Bateman
Her control over the drip-feeding, hint-dropping narrative combines to form a well-made novel. And, to further underline the pedagogical theme, the Miss Webster of the title is a retired grammar-school teacher. In an interview elsewhere Duncker tells how her own inspirational high-school teacher, George, taught not just the rudiments of writing, but how to be a writer: "Writing was not irrelevant entertainment. Writing was the place where the truth could be told."
The story is set in two locations, the village of Little Blessington, which is near one of the newer universities, and in Morocco. Spiky Miss Webster is still smarting from having been retired by diktat from a senior post in the French department of St Winifred's Catholic Girls school when it is absorbed into a much tougher catchment area. After some months she falls victim to a sort of seizure and, as part of the cure, her eccentric consultant orders her to holiday in an unfamiliar Francophone country. She opts for Morocco, and in no time a series of Miss Marplesque coincidences and false leads commence.
Two polite strangers guide her to internal departures at Casablanca airport and, because "someone had blundered", she ends up in "a smart new hotel with a view of seven palm trees and an endless desert beyond". At the hotel the glamorous, powerful receptionist, Saïda, who is ambitious for her handsome son, Chérif, assiduously looks after her every need. The same taxi driver who brought her from the airport takes Miss Webster on a tour through the desert to a wadi where Saïda's brother and family live. Later that year, one dark and stormy evening, the beautiful young Chérif arrives on her very English doorstep. Miss Webster decides to live dangerously and invites Chérif to stay on when he cannot find student accommodation.
Soon a niggle crops up about his identity and, more worryingly, about the coincidence that he, like the Twin Towers bombers, also studied maths and physics. Could he be an al-Qaeda emissary or, heaven forbid, a terrorist? After a performance of Carmen and a dramatic mugging in the wet streets of London Miss Webster and Chérif fetch up in a hospital where her original consultant just happens to have a clinic. It takes another trip to Morocco before a mistaken identity and other truths are revealed.
While not a didactic novel about the tendency in the West towards "hammering all Muslim men into an undifferentiated lump", plenty of satire is directed at local prejudices. Among the pleasures of the book are the tales of foreign travel, amusing encounters with authority and a brief immersion in the family life of a different culture. As with all good comic novels tragic consequences are averted and resolution is finally achieved.
Kate Bateman is a tutor in the school of English and drama at UCD
Miss Webster and Chérif By Patricia Duncker Bloomsbury, 244 pp. £12.99