Last of the Christmas books

I really don't understand publishers sometimes. Why would you give a book the cover in picture one (an Old Masters painting of a voluptuous seminaked woman) when you could have the much more dynamic exciting, accurate, attractive and relevant cover in picture 2?

Cover one is the UK edition of The Ruby in her Navel by Barry Unsworth.I was given the Australian paperback with cover two for Christmas. Because it looked so pretty, I've been saving it up to read for five weeks. I don't think I would have looked forward to reading it if it had been in cover one. I might even have wrapped it in brown paper before taking it on the train.

The book is set in twelfth century Sicily shortly after the second Crusade where the Christians apparently did quite badly and looked like they were going to lose hold of the kingdoms established in the first Crusade. Many of them went to lick their wounds in Sicily where a Frankish king had been ruling over a racially mixed society for decades, carefully balancing the skills and interests of the Saracen (Arabic Moslem), Byzantine Greek, Italian, French and German populations. The book is about palace conspiracies to reduce the power and influence of the Saracens.

The main character is a fairly naive young Frank who wants to be a knight but works within a Saracen-dominated administrative office. People keep EXPLAINING the political situation to him in a way that's a bit didactic and is probably my major problem with the book. This is an amazingly alien world that does need some explaining (and Unsworth does a fabulous job of describing the physical environment), but the approach is heavy-handed at times.

There's also an extremely exotic Turkish dancer who introduces what sounds like bellydancing to the western world. Phwoar!!!

Cover 2 shows the elements of the plot with its pictures of a jousting knight and a dancing girl (with a tiny red dot in her navel. You probably can’t see that). It also looks like it’s designed to imitate a manuscript that might have been illuminated by someone living in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic place like Sicily. Maybe it’s meant to be by a monk who grew up looking at Frankish knights but also understanding Arabic decoration. This just makes far far more sense as a cover than a pretty oil painting of a passive naked lady.

And at least cover 2 gives the woman a face.