Review: Old Saint Paul's by William Harrison Ainsworth

 I’ve been fond of William Harrison Ainsworth for a long time but it’s been a while since I last read one. He fits autumn wonderfully, the longer nights lend themselves to his lengthy, melodramatic form of storytelling. There’s also his choice of subject matter; deception, murder and frequently supernatural happenings that hang nicely with the gloomy season.

Old Saint Paul’s has a lot to recommend it, a tale set in London during some of its most gruesome history, 1665-66, plague and fire. With the inevitable addition of crossed love, criminality and other possible nuttiness, I was excited to begin it.

Ainsworth usually knows how to start a story, Jack Shepherd’s race down the Thames during the Great Storm is exciting and Auriol has one of the most balls-to-the-wall crazy and gripping openings involving severed heads, sudden grandfathers and the elixir of life. Old Saint Paul’s is a little more subdued, we are introduced to an upstanding London grocer and his family. His apprentice is in love with his daughter and, if following the Hogarth’s good apprentice progress, expects to marry her at some point. Unfortunately, she is also desired by others and a young rake has been suspiciously injured in their shop and is now in private rooms with her. This looks like it’s going to escalate further but then… plague! The grocer’s son is struck down.

Then….plague! Is a frequent occurrence in this book set during the great 1665 plague outbreak. Not that it’s surprising, but Ainsworth does seem to pull the trick out when he isn’t sure where to go or wants to throw in a moment of surprise and fear. The plague is a strange thing in the book, at times it seems to be instant death, with people noticing it and instantly dying. For others it seems to take longer, or to drive them to mad actions, like swimming the width of the Thames. It’s treated like an instant death sentence but a third of the characters survive a bout of plague, the hero, Leonard Holt, survives it twice.

It’s clear that Ainsworth is borrowing a lot from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Stories of people going crazy and purposefully infecting as many people as possible come from there, as well as stories about the grass growing in London streets. He says he gets the idea of the grocer barricading his house for months to become a fortress against the disease comes from Due preparations against the plague, both in soul and body. I found this plot line about a family holed up and waiting it out to be one of the most interesting. It’s also very interesting that he wrote this book before the link between plague, rats and fleas was properly known, so the transition of the illness is till described in terms of miasmas and bad air.

One of the influences of Defoe on the book is the character of Judith, the plague nurse. There’s a lot in talk in Journal of the Plague Year about nurses, how the literature at the time castigated them for hastening the end of their patients and stealing their valuables, but Defoe felt they did a good job. Judith is one of these bad nurses, she carries around pustule scrapings on a needle so she can give plague to people who get in her way. She uses the plague to steal and create hordes, which are often stolen from her. Mostly she’s bad because she revels in the plague, as does her accomplice, Chowles the coffin maker. These two have a grizzly ending, killed by a tidal wave of molten lead while hiding in the belly of the cathedral.

I think Ainsworth was trying to do for the old cathedral what Victor Hugo did for the Notre Dame. Both books contain lengthy descriptions of the architecture, using the gothic building to give a gothic air to the stories themselves. The big difference is that Notre Dame in Hugo’s book is a symbol of age and permanence, the machinations of the characters have no impact on the building which stood before the events in the book and will stand long after. Old Saint Paul’s is a structure with a time limit, it doesn’t even survive the events of the book, burnt down by the fire. As such, it’s not a symbol of permanence, but of the old, rotten order to be destroyed and rebuilt anew, the last image being of Wren’s finished building.

I learnt some interesting things about the building. One was of St Faith’s, which was a parish subsumed by the cathedral but held separately in the bowels of the building. Remnants of Saint Faith’s still exist under the current cathedral. Both our criminal and hero characters in the book find themselves retreating into St Faith’s and the crypts beneath. These crypts now have a very pleasant cafe, bookshop and free toilets. Something else I learned was that Saint Pauls also served as an indoor market and meeting place, with items, including food and drink, sold up the nave. I did some elaborate googling to check this, as I know a number of Ainsworth’s inventions have become folk knowledge, but his one was true. What is not true is that the building became a huge plague hospital, that is an Ainsworth invention, but it is a striking image, and fits his picture of Saint Paul’s as a symbol of the sick society that needs to be burnt down for a true godly society to exist.

Much of the book is about this sick society, one in which the rich can prey on the poorer, especially on their women. The rot sets in at the top, with Charles II portrayed as irreverent and lascivious but is most seen in the actions of the Earl of Rochester and Paul Parravicin. The first, a historic character, spends much of the book after the grocer’s daughter, Amabel. His frequent attempts to inveigle his way into her company become almost comic, especially as he frequents increasingly ludicrous disguises, at one point he’s disguised as a man called Gregory Swindlehurst… can we trust a man called that? He’s accompanied by Major Pillichody, a cowardly braggart whose distinctive manner of speech and one eye draws the reader to the disguises, even if the characters are too stupid to notice. Interestingly, one of Rochester’s disguises is as a quack medicine man, something he really did.

The Jeremiah calling on the plague and fire of London is a man called Solomon Eagle, who lives in the upper parts of the cathedral and frequently wears a lit brazier on his head, which made me think of Arthur Brown (from The Crazy World of..). Not only does he prophecy London’s sickness and burning, but he helps start the great fire of London with Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker who confessed to starting it with grenades. During the fire, Charles II grows up and becomes a proper leader to his people and Rochester risks his life to save others, while those who don’t reform (like Judith and Chowles) are burnt away, along with the old, corrupt church.

Old Saint Paul’s is not Ainsworth’s best. The overall theming, the sickness of London and the purifying fire are interesting and there are a few stand out moments, the chapter where a group of people perform a wild Danse Macabre is a striking moment but it’s poorly plotted and the characters are weak. Ainsworth isn’t the best creator of character, and Pillichody is quite funny, Judith and Chowles are boo-hiss evil, but Leonard Holt, the grocer, even the Earl of Rochester are rather dull. What’s more, in the great Ainsworth books he can rely on his great talent for set-pieces and striking visuals to carry the book along, but this just gets muddled. There’s too much back and forward with the Rochester/Amabel/Holt plots, too many people catch the plague and then survive it, there’s too much wandering about. (Naturally ‘the pretty little village of Willesden gets a call out). 

There’s also a plot thread featuring Holt, Paul Parravicin, a mysterious man, a girl called Nissi and a blind piper which isn’t very interesting and relies on a grand secret which is teased and put off so many times it becomes irritating, and then isn’t all that revelatory after all.

Not that I didn’t enjoy this at all, I enjoyed it fine but I’ve read Ainsworth books that reached higher levels and I thought a book set in the time of plague and fire would reach those.  

I Love Shonky Museums

 In the summer, I went to Derby to visit three museums. One was a multi-million pound regeneration of a UNESCO heritage site, another, a local museum and gallery with a special exhibition about the town’s most famous artist, and the third, a house museum that included the UK’s largest toy theatre collection, an exhibition about the Tomb Raider games and a Victorian bathroom the visitors can use at their convenience. The third museum was my favourite, it was also the shonkiest. I love a shonky museum.

My favourite museum, one of my favourite places in the world, is Doctor Johnson’s House. It is a small museum, probably underfunded (at least, I’d like to see it have more money) but it’s not shonky, probably due to the principles established by its founder. So what is shonky museum? It’s a museum with a confused collection that shows residues of past fads in accumulation and presentation.. and I love them.

My Platonic idea of a shonky museum

This imaginary museum is in a medium-sized town, housed in an old library or mid-sized late Victorian building. It may have a small modern addition, probably with toilets and a school visitor’s room. 

It started as a local antiquary society and the original museum was in their meeting place or the house of a leading member. This leading member had an interest in something fairly obscure, say Etruscan pottery, which forms the core of the collection. This has been bulked up over the years by the various donations of other members and often a bunch of stuff the town council had which they didn’t know what to do with. There will be fossils and ammonites, some stuffed animals, items brought back by members in colonial service, some old toys and packaging, a few neolithic axe-heads and maybe a hoard discovered by some local detectorists. There will always be at least one shard of Roman Samian-ware. If the original collector had the funds and contacts, some of the Etruscan pottery may be significant but generally it will be full of the odds and ends found in any local museum. The modern curator will be faintly embarrassed of their collection and squeamish about providence.

In the early days, a person would have needed to book a visit to the collection but some time in 1934 it became available to the general public on weekends and bank holidays. Leading up to the Diamond Jubilee in 1977, it moved to some defunct library or council building where they now open Saturdays and weekdays, except Mondays and Wednesday afternoons. It had a long, cumbersome name but the locals called it something shorter (if not merely, The Museum).

At some point in the early 90s, the museum won a grant from the National Lottery and used it to modernise. They changed the name to something cool and flashy, but the locals kept calling it the name they always had. They invested in a new, immersive, themed part of the building, probably setting up a Victorian kitchen. This allowed them to display all the old packets of things they had laying around, use the old mangle and set up the cast iron cooking range that had been clogging up storage space. They filled it with replica cooking utensils and that plastic food you only ever see in museums. (I’ve been to so many of these places I now recognise the exact types of bread rolls, cabbages and meats, they all seem to be from the same place. They are expensive, a small mediaeval pie costs £35). This food will not be very well maintained, the tastier items will display a child’s bite mark and the drinks will be covered in a layer of grey dust.

They have also installed my favourite item in a shonky museum, a mannequin with a repeating speech track near it. In this case the mannequin has been dressed as a Victorian maid in a mob cap, the costume now looking slightly threadbare and seedy. The voice track is of the woman complaining about all the chores and tasks she has to do, there may also be the sound of servant’s bells. She will have been played by an actor putting on a poor accent, full Eliza Doolittle if near London, Vera Duckworth if near Manchester - you get the idea. The mannequin will be just that, no animatronics or anything and the looped speech track will mean that spending too long in the Victorian kitchen will be unbearable.

Coming up to the millennium, out museum received a grant for the big two-zero-zero-zero. They renamed the museum again, to a shorter version of the original name. The locals still call it what they always have. They updated their explanation cards and signage to make it more visual, but made it less informative. They brought in a small section where children can try on old clothes, top hats and mob-caps but many of these are now a little ripped and tatty. They also installed a number of interactive features, either with screens of mechanical sliding foors or pop ups - most of which no longer work. 

And since then, that’s it, because the new rejuvenation was canceled after the 2008 crash, then there was austerity, then Brexit and councils don’t have the money to spend on nice things anymore.

The council will hire a curator, who may have a number of sites to oversee but most of the day-to-day running will be by volunteers. These will mostly be retired folk, maybe the odd student for a few months. There will be two types of volunteers; the ones who do it to get out the house and talks to people, and the ones who have an obsessive knowledge of the town or some of the items in the collection (that Etruscan pottery again). The volunteers will incessantly snipe and bicker at each other for updating the visitor book wrong or setting out the souvenir pencils incorrectly. However, all the volunteers will be warm and welcoming to visitors and will be a good percentage of the museum’s charm.

I’m not sure I’ve been to anywhere that is all of this, but I’ve been to many that are some of it. I may have been taking the piss a little but I love these places and I hope they keep muddling through for decades to come. 

Review: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

 There was a time when I used to read many books about writing but I lost the urge as I passed my MA in ‘writing’ and quietly plugged away at my writing projects. I’d not heard of Bird by Bird until this year but for some reason, it kept popping up in my attention, the way things do. Then, I was in a charity shop and saw a copy, it seemed like fate.

Structured as a set of seminars, where Anne Lamott tells the reader what she’d tell her students, and also the things she’d like to say to them but probably wouldn’t. The book deals more with the writing life than writing itself, and the writing life as she sees it in particular.

I begins with a pretty typical ‘weird kid becomes writer’ story. Tom Gauld did this brilliant cartoon once where mysterious hooded figures come and take a child from their parents. The parents cry and wail, wishing they hadn’t gone to the library so much. The child declares “I’m a writer now” as they are taken away by the hooded figures. It does feel like that, some people simply get into these book things too hard and they are cursed to be the writers.

It’s in this first section that the first disquieting note arose. She says she loved to hang out with the oddballs. The oddballs are defined as “ethnic people, theatre people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians”. I could generously interpret the statement to mean that they were different to the kinds of people she knew with her conservative background (and a later tangent on school lunches reveals how limited and conservative this background was) but in light of other comments, it does seem she sees anyone not from this background as strange. Soon after she says how all her stories involved a character meeting “someone like a clown, or a foreigner.”

I think it’s supposed to be a bit of jokey self-deprecation, playing a ‘bit’ on what a poor teacher she is, but she really has no generosity for her students. She mainly portrays them as irritating losers, too hung up on publication and generally rather pathetic. She sighs when they keep asking her about agents, and in some senses I should see why, the writing itself should be more important than the agent, but these are students on a writing course - of course they are interested in how to get an agent. What’s more, for her to dismiss the question about agents has a sour taste when you realise she simply used her dad’s agent and didn’t have to go through the process herself.

There is a good point to made in focussing on the writing not the publication, as there is in telling would-be published writers that publication isn’t the cure-all they are hoping for. There are some other good pieces of advice as well, the titular “bird-by-bird”, which could also be seen as word-by-word. Writing is a series of small decisions and work that lead to a larger whole. I like her insistence on writing at least 300 words a day to keep up a routine. I liked the reminder that plot springs from character, that a writer should trust their intuition and that the pain of perfectionism can be massaged out like a muscle cramp.

To be honest, it’s the reflections on life that made this a pretty unpleasant book. She really leans into the pain of writing and the self doubt. As someone who dreads the moment before I start writing and do all sorts to put that moment off, I understand where she is coming for but Lamott makes it sound like there is almost no part of writing that she enjoys. I actually have a nice time once I get started, it’s the getting started that hurts.

There’s also a lot in the book about jealousy. She condemns Muriel Spark to having “bad things rain down” upon her because she enjoys writing. There’s a whole chapter on jealousy and it’s really ugly. I think she’s trying to overstate her jealousy, create humour by hyperbole, but it’s just horrid. She talks about putting a friendship ‘on sabbatical’ because the friend was successful. It gets really ugly when she says about what got her out of her jealousy, a documentary in AIDS. She decides that if these people can keep going with the ravages of that disease, she can face her jealousy.

Another chapter is about how she does charitable work at an old people’s home and how she learns, shock horror, that the old people are people. True, not proper people, some of them smell of wee and have thinning hair, but something like people. It’s a true revelation to her. Another time she tells a story of a church committee and says that there were 3 African-American women and one white one - the race had nothing to do with the story, why did she need to include that?

I can accept a lot the ugly things she says are her playing a role, doing a ‘bit’, making herself out to be worse than she is but I think there is a real ugliness underneath a lot of it. She says she writes because she enjoys embodying other people, getting into her skin but a lot of her writing (including here) is about her, and a lot of her. There are too many instances where she seems to treat other people like props for it to seem like a coincidence. 

Some of the writing advice is good, some of the life writing engaging but I found this book too ugly to be enjoyable. 

Review: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

 I’d heard a little about The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and thought the approach suited the novel I’m currently writing, which is structured around scenes throughout a character’s life that adds up to a pattern of who they are and the society they live in. However, I thought I’d get a copy of the essay so I could really study the nitty-gritty details of the theory.

I was pretty surprised when the book came and it was so small. It’s not a long essay, even by essay standards. What’s more, it’s not an essay of nitty-grittys or detail, it’s principally vibes based. This does mean that as a purchase, this book was a little disappointing but as a way of directing my thinking, it’s very good.

My copy starts with an essay by Doona Haraway, who seems to take the carrier bag element a little literally. There’s a photograph of three of her bags, with descriptions of their provenance and what the bags mean to her. She seemed to be writing a fictional theory of carrier bags more than introducing The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

Le Guin begins by putting forward a picture of a hunter-gatherer society, one which does a lot more gathering than hunting. They also have a lot of free time to lark about and tell stories. She has fun with ‘cavemen’ type names for her characters, chatty little Oom, baby Oo Oo, Ool with the good sense of humour (Ool the droll?). She says that there aren’t all that many great stories about shelling wheat but when groups of hunters came back, they had dramatic stories of impalement and action, and what’s more they had a hero.

Heroes take over stories, they start demanding that stories are all about them. What’s more hero stories are stories of death, violence and often include pointy objects. She calls it the killer story, the linear story. A story needs to go like an arrow, in a straight line. It needs clear us and them. If it’s a heroic story they die, if it’s a tragedy we do. It’s a story as rigid as a spear.

Le Guin suggests a different kind of story, one from an older technology, the bag. It’s a story that involves gathering, saving, keeping. It’s a story of co-operation and protection rather than death. She says that a novel is an inherently unheroic sort of story, a bag that holds words. “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

 It was this conception of the novel that appealed to me. As I’ve been writing, I occasionally glance at some Youtube ‘writing content’. To often they cite books that don’t particularly appeal to me or talk about books in mechanistic ways, like a book is a set of parts you click together. I like the notion of a novel as something more personal, a collection of the things that hang together, with the story being told in their relationship. This book didn’t help me much with practical suggestions of how to do that, but to do that would have betrayed the point of it. The idea is to search through the bushes and gather, to get a feeling for the right things, to polish the shells and shell the grain. A how-to guide would be back to that mechanistic, pointy tool approach.

Le Guin genders her story types. She presents the hero/killing/spear story as male and the carrier bag one as female. However, there’s been a lot of research on these early cultures since LeGuin wrote this essay in 1988. Impressive and complex structures like Göbekli Tepe were created by hunter-gatherers. What’s more, skeletal remains are as likely to show women being injured in ways that suggest hunting as it was men. The suggestion now, is that both men and women gathered most of the time, and then all the young, fit members would gather together for a hunt. 

She says how her lack of connection to the hero’s story made her feel not a part of culture or civilisation, not fully human. That in discovering this feminine form of story, one of gathering, collecting and protecting, she feels fully human for the first time. I think both kinds of stories are human, but I know the kind I feel speaks more to me.

What’s more, she talks about how this story type need not be empty of conflict or action, only that those elements are simply parts of the whole story, items in the carrier bag.

It wasn’t a long essay, but it is a full one and one that’s got me thinking. 

Review: Fables of the East edited by Ros Ballaster

 Having read A Thousand Nights and One Night, I decided to top it off with Fables of the East, an anthology of works charting the entrance and impact of ‘eastern’ writings into Britain in the early modern period. 

It’s actually a companion piece to Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785, so there wasn’t much in the book to explain why these pieces in particular were chosen. The idea of ‘the east’ is very wide in the selection, spanning from China to Turkey, including sojourns in India and Iran. It also includes more travel writing, history and epistolary fiction than actual fables. I wasn’t sure why this was without the argument of the main text, but I enjoyed what I got.

The first was the most famous, The Arabian Nights Entertainments. This was a translation of the dedication, preface and initial frame story from the Galland edition, the first available in the west and translated from his French. The book describes Galland as a ‘translator’, his authority being very suspected (and I imagine the reasons for this were better explained in the companion book).

It was interesting to read this ‘original’ version so shortly after a different translation. One thing it highlighted is that the frame story has Shahryar being a Sassanian, a Persian dynasty that existed before the advent of Islam. This suggests the ancient nature of the frame story with Scheherezade, but also means that the stories of the past with Haroun Al-Rashid actually took place after the story framing it - a strange thing to think about. It’s also interesting how the frame story is all about illicit sex, an act carefully elided by a ‘modesty will not allow’… it did allow in my edition.

The next inclusion was from a Sanskrit fable collection, here called The Fables of Pilpay, but also known as Panchatantra. This has a frame story of a sage telling a Chinese Emperor about another sage telling his king animal fables to teach wise conduct and rule. These animals stories seem rather like Reynard the Fox, with a battle of wits between the sneaky fox and the lion king (though the king is triumphant in these stories).

The part we had involved a war between corvids and owls. A raven has volunteered to be a spy in the owl camp, has had himself beaten up and gone to the owls claiming that he has been turned on by the other corvids. One of the advisors is deeply suspicious and suggests a tale to show why he is so, the leader of the owls agrees to the tale with a wonderfully irritated, “I shall hear this fable for once, but I will not promise to be a pin the better for it.” The true response to most forms of advice.

The advisor’s fable is about a mouse who is turned into a woman but ends up marrying a rat anyway. To quote another fabulist, ‘a leopard can’t change his spots’. Turns out the advisor was right and the crow leads all the owls to complete destruction. It’s funny, there were very few animal fables in The Thousand Nights and One Night, when they seem such a staple of the genre.

The next chapter is from The History of Commladeve. This is broadly a translation of an earlier text but with heavy additions. One of these is having the narrator being a character’s best friend, but reincarnated as a parrot. I found this one stodgy in its attempt to emulate the lushness of A Thousand Nights and One Night, and a little boring as a story.

The next entry is an oriental tale completely invented by an East Indian Company chaplain. It’s about a poor girl called Urad who is mentored by a genie in disguise. When her mother dies, a local fisherman tries to rape her, then a band of brigands, then a wizard and finally a vizier. She’s protected throughout by magic peppercorns that dissolve illusions, turn her into an ant (using the now regional term ‘pismire’) and summon lions to eat her tormentors. It starts a little slowly, but once the magical peppercorns enter, it’s good fun.

The reader is now very lucky indeed because the next section is by the fantastic Eliza Haywood, what’s more, best Eliza Haywood, early Haywood. It’s from a novel called Philidore and Placentia, I think the name ‘Placentia’ is a hilarious one for a heroine. This extract is about a very unlucky Grand Tourist who is captured and made a slave before being castrated for his amors with one of his master’s wives. He escaped but is too embarrassed to return home sans testicles. To be honest, it was his own fault. He’s lucky he was spared the old spike up the anus so favoured in the Nights. 

This is followed by a Spectator essay about how fables allow us to take advice because it’s artfully given, then one of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, ‘Mi Li, A Chinese Fairy Tale’. It’s not my favourite of his tales, I prefer the one about Pissimissi, or the dead prince with three legs who doesn’t marry the one legged princess. However, it is a nice bit of Walpole silliness and Ballaster points out how Mi Li can also be read as ‘my lie.’

We then get travel tales, with François Bernier traveling to Kashmir with Aurangzeb, the Mughal Emperor. He did not travel light. A lot of the section talks about how many people (and mules, camels, elephants and such) went with him and how they set up. Essentially most of Delhi travelled with him, with all the market places from the city being re-set up in tent form whenever they stopped. This is not to count the whole harem, court, army.. essentially an entire city on the move, recreating high streets and districts every time they stop. One very important thing, try to be as far away from the harem as they travel as any glimpse may involve being beaten up. As a later text had, the Mughal Emperor might be one of the richest monarchs in the world, but he also had some of the biggest expenses and hassle.

It sounds like a deeply unpleasant experience, with skin-baking heat, possibility of bad water and worms that infest a person’s legs. Not to mention the chaos at every river crossing. The Emperor has a better time, he even takes time to hunt… and cheats. There was an account of lion hunts, where the lions are essentially herded into a spot for the Emperor to shoot repeatedly. There were even suspicions that the lions were drugged. Even with all this, Aurangzeb missed one and they had to stop the whole journey to track the lion down and kill it, as failing to kill a lion was regarded as bad luck.

This was followed by part of a history of the Mughal Empire of the siege of Chitor, which read more like an Arabian Night than some of the more fabulist entries. Then there were some letters of Elizabeth Montagu, which I read a few years ago with the Samuel Johnson Reading Circle.

The most interesting pieces were the three last ones. I’d never heard of the first, The Turkish Spy. Apparently it launched a whole genre of epistolary spy novels. Mahmut is an Arab but is working for the Ottoman Empire and is pretending to be a Moldavian scholar. He’s in Paris, reporting on the scandals and intrigues around Cardinal Richelieu. He also writes to his brother in India, talking about the Mughal Empire, clearly using the books featured earlier in this one. The last letter ends with a deep paranoia, with Mahmut thinking that his government are killing off the spies no longer useful to them so he goes into hiding. It’s a very interesting idea for a book, but is rather dour and humourless, and at 8 volumes, I don’t think I’ll be looking for it.

The next extract is from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, which takes the format of the Persian Spy but lightens the claustrophobia of it, with the main letter writers being travellers rather than spies. I’ve got a copy but I’m yet to read it. Most of the extracts chosen here are actually concerning the difficulties Usbek has at leaving his seraglio behind. There are letters from the eunuchs saying that the women are restless, suggestions of lesbianism and finally, a letter from his favourite and most loyal wife. She’s written to Usbek to say how much she hates him and is killing herself to spite him. It’s a strange inclusion for a book that felt quite light otherwise.

The last selection is from something I’ve read many times, Oliver Goldsmith’s A Citizen of the World. It was lovely to spend a little time with Lien Altangi, the puzzled, quizzical and ultimately very likeable writer of his letters from a ‘Chinese’ man. 

One of the through lines of all the text was how English understanding of eastern lands was mediated through the French in particular. Although the period covered in the selection is the same one in which the East India Company were establishing their power in India, with a couple of the authors working for them, most of the texts were French first. Only Elizabeth Montagu’s letters and Goldsmiths Citizen of the World were written in English first. This then had the interesting element of how much of English writing about ‘the east’ was also criticism of France, and how many of the prejudices were French ones over English. 

With that, the anthology was over - not as many fables as I’d have liked but I read my Goldsmith at the end and went home happy. 

Review: A Thousand Nights and One Night (Volume 4) by J.C Mardrus and Powys Matthews

As a melange of stories, I was expecting all the volumes of Mardrus and Mathers’s The Thousand Nights and One Night to be of equal quality, but I think the fourth volume may be the best. Some of the stories seemed better written than others, there were a greater range of interesting details (over stock phrases) and a greater brio and fun to many of them.

One of the most famous stories from the collection, and a later addition, is also the best written. ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ is not only a great story but seemed to have fuller characters and storytelling than many of the others. Ali Baba is an interesting fellow in himself, happy to sustain himself without any greater ambition, he stumbles on the thieves and their cave. I’d always assumed the cave was called Sesame, and so responded to that name but the phrase ‘open sesame’ can magically open anything - and Ali Baba doesn’t abuse that power.

His brother and sister-in-law are ambitious and she’s particularly curious why Ali and his wife want to borrow some scales, what do they have to need measuring? To assuage this curiosity, she puts suet in the scales and manages to snag a gold coin. She’s incensed, how come Ali and his wife have so much gold that they need to measure it instead of counting? Alas for Kasim, Ali’s brother, this leads to tragedy. This is where the fabulous Marjarnah comes in. She’s clever enough to realise that Kasim’s body needs disposing of in a legitimate but quiet manner and also the ways to make it happen and cover her tracks. She’s also the family’s most level-headed and sharp member, protecting them from the retribution of the thieves in every step. She’s wonderful.

This volume also includes a number of fairy tales. There’s a Cinderella variation where the prince seeks the woman with slim enough ankles to fit an anklet. Of course he can’t go into the harems, so his mother has to do the search for him. There are two Beauty and the Beast stories, the first with a woman who marries a goat, and the second with a man ho marries a tortoise. It was especially fun to see a man in the ‘Beauty’ role. Strangest of all was ‘The Tale of Hard Head and Little Foot’. They are brother and sister, with Hard Head being an absolute psycho. He sets fire to his own house, he murders children by beating them so hard he ‘empastes’ them onto the floor, he then shits on the grieving father’s head. Later they are captured by a roc, and he tickles its arse - and yet his actions are proved ‘right’ at the end because he kills a terrible darkness-monster.

This volume has stories of Goha, a figure like Nasreddin Hoja, who displays a form of wise silliness. A lot of his silliness revolves around his penis though, he even calms a baby down with it and claims to have tried to shag a cat. It’s unsettling. There’s a stories from history section. It starts with tales of warring Arab tribes, goes on to the figure of Umar and then stories of Haroun Al-Rashid’s sons. My favourite of these was the idea of ‘Tufailism’, a form of gatecrashing fancy meals.

There were a number of stories where a lover has to answer riddles from his beloved under the pain of being decapitated. The woman lives in a tower festooned with the heads of failed suitors. It’s also a book of bad wives. One of them is a freaky vampire who sucks blood from corpses, another is such a bad nag when she is thrown down a well, and begs to be saved from her. The best nagging wife is called Fattimah Hot-Slop. Her husband escapes her, blags his way into marrying a princess, finds a genie (which the evil wazir temporarily steals) and appears to alive happily ever after. Then Fatimah Hot-Slop bursts back into the scene like the heavy in a Bond film.  I was rooting for Fatimah Hot-Slop.

Haroun Al-Rashid and gang also had some good stories in this. ‘Unending Treasure’ starts with Jafar being trouble yet again because he’s claimed a man his even more generous than Al-Rashid. Luckily for Jafar, it turns out the man is, because he’s got a never ending swimming pool of money. Another story has the gang meeting people on a bridge and asking them back for their stories. In another, Haroun Al-Rashid feels down and nature doesn’t cheer him up, nor does his 360 sex slaves. Jafar recommends visiting the library as “A library of books is the fairest garden of the world and to walk there is ecstasy.” Haroun finds a book that makes him laugh and cry, but when Jafar asks him what the story is, find himself again under threat of death for his presumption. 

Poor ‘ol Jafar. I don’t know much about the historical figure, but the literary character has been so unlucky. He’s a skilled wazir, ruling the country well for his khalifah, whom he is best friend. However he is well aware that every times he talks to Haroun Al-Rashid, he’s playing with fire. For a king called Al-Rashid, ‘the just’, he is a moody and unpredictable soul and Jafar is constantly threatened with various forms of execution and disgrace. Poor Jafar, Disney named their villain after him and now the name means evil guy with a twisted beard. (Incidentally, the tales have a prince Jasmine, but no princess). In this volume Jafar finally ends his run, being decapitated, his whole family imprisoned, killed or scattered, and his own remains thrown in latrines. It’s a genuinely sad moment when a reasonable man is destroyed by the unreason of arbitrary rule. It’s also the end of Haroun Al-Rashid’s glory days and the end of Baghdad as ‘the city of peace’. It’s a fitting (penultimate) tale to the whole sequence.

Finally, we reach the end of the frame sequence. It turns out that Scherazade has been cooking up more than stories, and presents three male heirs to her king. He marries her and persuades his brother to marry Dumyazad, even if the brother can’t remember her name. It was notable that Dumyazad was described as having grown into the perfect woman, a being that includes the quality of silence. Especially interesting nearly all the words in this 2,500 page book are said by a woman. It’s a happy ending, with the king humanised through all the stories his heard, even as it seems a little flimsy. Stories are powerful, but are they that powerful?

Reading all of The Thousand Nights and One Night was a superb experience. To read it all in a run is overwhelming, not only the length but the denseness of them, the cultural remove, the excess of sounds and sights and smells but I never found it a boring experience. I never felt like I was gritting my teeth and plowing through this collection, it was always a joy and a pleasure. I am glad I’ve got to the end so I can pursue other flavours of text, but this was a banquet worth enjoying.