[1] The third of the author’s four novels, The Spider’s House is his only work that encompasses a contemporary political crisis: the struggle for Moroccan independence from French colonial rule during the 1950s.

There I adopted the same ritual; early tea was brought in at six o’clock, and I set to work, still meeting my quota of two daily pages.”[6]Critic Virginia Spencer Carr reports that Bowles was concerned that the manuscript he submitted for publication “lacked certain melodramatic flourishes to which his readers had become accustomed.” John Lehmann, his British agent and publisher, complained that the novel was “very slow moving, a problem I attribute in part to the central character’s being an Arab boy who is neither interesting nor active enough to bear the weight that is put upon him .

[8] Literary critic Charles J. Rolo praised The Spider’s House for possessing elements of “a first-class political thriller” but added that “the plot meanders all over the place, accumulating sound and fury and signifying precious little in terms of political ideas or anything else.”[9] Despite these shortcomings, the novel offers a “vivid fidelity and richness of detail with which it re-creates the Arab scene...Bowles has certainly made the explosive city of Fez come powerfully to life.”[10] ”Even Chekhov, whom we also tend to think of as a largely apolitical writer (in contrast, say, to Dostoevsky or Tolstoy) frequently established or clarified the nature of his characters by informing the reader about their political sympathies…With Bowles’s sangfroid, his lack of empathy, his chilly skepticism, his refusal to demonstrate an even passing interest in the process of spiritual transformation or individual redemption, he is the anti-Chekhov.” - Literary critic Francine Prose[11] The Spider’s House has been widely recognized as the most “political” of Bowles’s novels.

Literary critic Francine Prose, writing in 2002, shortly after the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and just before the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 wrote: The Spider's House ought to top those lists of novels that speak to our present cultural condition.

Set in Fez during the first of the upheavals that announced a more radical and violent phase of the Moroccan struggle for independence from the French, the book seems not merely prescient but positively eerie in its evocation of a climate in which every aspect of daily life is affected--and deformed --by the roilings of nationalism and terrorism, by the legacy of colonialism, and by chaotic political strife.”[15]Though occurring in the context of political turmoil, Bowles’s nihilistic and misanthropic outlook persists throughout the novel.