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. 

Review: A Thousand Nights and One Night (Volume 3) by J.C Mardrus and Powys Matthews

Are fishermen rude?

There are a lot of stories featuring rude fishermen in this third volume of The Thousand Nights and One Night. 

We have Abdullah, the fisherman who catches a merman (also called Abdullah), rather like the fisherman who caught a genie in the first volume. Abdullah is the politest of the fishermen and maintains a good relationship with the merman, and a good relationship with those around him. His local baker, another Abdullah, trusts him so much that he lets the fisherman have bread on credit - though I have noticed that bakers in these stories are far kinder than millers in European tales. Abdullah eventually goes into the underwater world for a little explore. These people with fish tails find him extraordinary because “never in their lives had they seen a bottom, or anything that looked like a bottom’. He ends up feeling extremely self-conscious and breaks off ties with the merman.

Another fisherman, Khalifah, is extraordinarily rude to everyone. He pushes people out the way, frequently threatens to bugger them and is generally brusque and rough. He’s even rude to Haroun Al-Rashid, and Al-Rashid isn’t even in his usual merchant disguise, he’s fully dressed in his royal finery but Khalifah gets him doing chores and threatens him when he’s too slow. In some stories this may mean beheading or a spike up the arse, but Al-Rashid finds it hilarious and blesses the rude fisherman with riches.

There’s another fisherman in ‘The Diwan of Easy Jests’, an interlocked set of silly tales. This fisherman is a pot-head with a keen sense of the absurd. He tells a number of stories, many of them involving the religious arbitrators, the kadi, and donkeys. He is then given the job of wazir, where he enacts skewed pot-head justice through the kingdom. 

This volume has two mer-people tales, as the one following Abdullah is a story of a king marrying a mermaid and his son sparking a full on mer-war. You know that Samandal is an evil mer-king because he laughs evily till he farts and has ‘prodigious’ testicles that hang to his knees. His daughter has a bottom splendid enough to merit a whole paragraph.

‘The Tale of Hasan of Basrah’ has an impressive build-up, with a whole frame story dedicated to a quest to find the last and greatest story never heard, and Hasan’s being the result. He’s tricked out of his house by an evil Persian sorcerer and taken by a winged horse to the top of a mountain. He immediately pushes the sorcerer off the mountain, job’s a good ‘un. Naturally he finds a golden palace full of beautiful spirits. He finds a secret door that leads to another palace with even more beautiful women who are birds when they wear feathered cloaks. Rather like a typical selkie myth, he hides the cloak. Also inevitably, she gets it back, so he goes on a desperate quest to win her back. The element I most enjoyed in this story was the woman who loved him but helped him win the selkie-woman because of her love for him. It’s a trope in one of the earlier stories and it’s one I appreciate. What’s most interesting about this story is that it is written differently to many of the other tales, with more addresses to the reader and self consciously luscious writing. 

A number of the stories in this volume were more self-consciously muslim. While most of the stories call on Allah and assert Muhammad as his prophet, a number of these tales were more emphatically didactic. ‘The Tale of Young Nur and the Warrior Girl’ was the most bloodily emphatic. The warrior girl was a princess of Constantinople and so a heathen Christian but she converts to Islam because of the quality of Nur’s kindness and love-making. When she is captured and taken back to Christendom, she is baptised in the blood in one hundred muslim men. Of course Nur follows her and they meet in a church where he is hiding as a monk. They have sex in the church, described as “the holiest act in that dark place” and the reader is exhorted to “be ever preserved from chastity, that impure thing.” From the perspective of the tale, a monk’s devotion to chastity is one of his most irredeemable qualities. 

Sex appears in many of the tales, but is most interestingly described in ‘The Tale of Kamar and Halimah, the Expert’, where she teaches him the grammar, verbs and nouns of sex and they perform “the battle of legs and thighs” where his “pilgrim’s stick tapped many times down the road that night”. There have been numerous times across the volumes where characters have been proud of the proverb that no muslim woman will die a virgin. In some ways this is expressed as a proud enjoyment of Allah’s gifts but it does lead to a lot of 13 year old ‘women’ being described as ‘ripe’ and that remains queasy no matter how many times it pops up. (Another proverb that popped up was “A camel boy never achieves pilgrimage until he has buggered his camel” - no idea what that one is supposed to mean.)

“The Tale of the Sleeper Wakened” has Haroun Al-Rashid in his habitual disguise and meeting a man who will only have people round for dinner and acknowledge them once because they disappoint him on further meetings. He decides to have fun with the man, drugs him, takes him to the palace and gets everyone to act like he’s the ruler. Then he drugs him and takes him back. Understandably, this makes the man go insane for a while and Al-Rashid feels bad about it and sets him up for life.

Finally, this is the volume with Aladdin in it, or Ali Al-Din. He actually has two genies in this story, one in a ring and one on the lamp. This is very handy for when one of his genies is out of commission. He also has all the wishes he requires and no magic carpet - that’s actually in a separate tale. This story was actually a little hacked up in my copy, with some of the story missing and some of it printed twice - it was actually handy that this tale is one I already knew. 

After over 1,700 pages of tales, (not counting the other books of tales I’ve read this year), I’m not getting tale-fatigue but I am getting tale-overload. I’m having to rely on my notes more to extract individual tales as they have become a thick, steaming, aromatic soup of stories in my head. I have another 500-odd pages to go, so I expect the soup to become even thicker. 

Review: A Thousand Nights and One Night (Volume 2) by J.C Mardrus and Powys Matthews

 On reflecting on the second volume of Mardrus and Mathers’s translation, The Thousand Nights and One Night, I was most struck by the differences from the first volume. Gone were the nested stories and the huge epics, this volume had more self-contained stories or other story collections subsumed within it. ‘The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor’ originally existed outside the text, and it seems like collections like ‘The Flowering Terrace of Wit and the Garden of Gallantry’ did also. 

I also noticed that the nights got shorter, with the stories split into smaller chunks. The first book relied on stock phrases between the stories, with Dunyazad remarking that the stories are “sweet and pleasant to the taste”, then the formulaic descriptions of Shahryar conducting justice on his diwan before going back to bed and hearing the next story. Instead, there are far more interactions between the central three, with Shahryar asking for certain kinds of story or threatening beheading if he doesn’t get the kind he wants. There are also more descriptions of Dunyazad being shocked by some of the stories, hiding her face or blushing. Through it all, Scheherazade keeps going, from story to story.

One of the elements that Shahryar demands in a story is gay sex. When he doesn’t get it, he threatens until he does. There were some gay elements in the first volume but this book includes much more transgressive sex in general. ‘The Tale of Kamar Al-Zaman and the Princess Budur, Moon of Moons’ is full of interesting trans moments. It begins with two Ifrit having an argument over whether Kamar or Budur are the most attractive, they have challenges of poetry before putting the two together and seeing who cracks first. After a number of teasing near misses, Budur finds herself masquerading as a king. Kamar comes to the city and she flirts with him, commanding him to have sex with her. He thinks she’s a man and feels a bit strange about it but decides to give it a go. Budur goes right up to the limit when she has to reveal her own sex. The next story also includes cross-dressing but Shahryar declares it too hetero and wants some more gay stuff.

This leads to a story of Abu Nawas, a real poet who did write about loving boys. He’s one of many real people fictionalised in the tales and is part of the court of Haroun Al-Rashid. This was a famous king of Baghdad who is depicted in the tales as mixing generosity and sudden retributive violence, He’s prone to depression and insomnia and often goes out the palace disguised as a merchant to have adventures. He’s often joined by his wazir, Jafar, also based on a real person. Unlike the Disney version, this Jafar is a pretty decent man, often calming the king down in his rages and trying to do his best for others, often under threat of execution himself. He’s the one playing detective in the previous volume and he also seems to have trouble controlling his own family. They are usually joined by Mansrur, the king’s bodyguard and executioner. This trio often pop up in the stories, sometimes joined by the jesting Abus Nawas and their world is fleshed out and developed throughout the tales.

Probably the most famous set of stories in this volume are the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor. He’s very different from the figure in the Harryhausen films though, he’s not an adventurer as much as he is a very unlucky merchant. He sets off from Basrah, is blown off course, has outlandish adventures before returning home richer but swearing off travel - then he sets off again. He comes across the roc twice, once being carried to a land of diamonds. He meets an ancient Greek figure, the old man of the sea, who forces Sindbad to give him a piggyback whilst doing ‘his solid and liquid needs’ on him. Sindbad also meets a giant cannibal whom he blinds in a story reminiscent of Polyphemus. The darkest story has Sindbad living in a society where the spouse is buried alive when the other dies. He lives in the well of corpses by killing any future spouses buried alive and eating their provisions. For all the violence in the whole of the collection, this element was the creepiest to me.

Another travel story is ‘The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass’, an almost Ozymandian reflection on death and the fragility of human achievement. Another notable story was ‘The Ebony Horse’, in which a fantastic mechanical horse is created by a hideous mechanic with ‘lips drooping like a camel’s testicles’. It’s notable because it seems to be the basis of the unfinished ‘Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales - it’s also a very fun story about a cool bit of ‘tech’.

My favourite story in this volume was, ‘The Tale of the Shifts of Delilah the Wily and her Daughter, Zainab the Cheat, with Ahmad the Moth, Hasan the Pest and Ali Quicksilver’. Delilah the Wily and Zainab the Cheat had appeared in a story in the first volume but here they were central to it. The two women perform various tricks and thieveries in order to gain the attention of Haroun Al-Rashid. They do this because he recently made Ahmad the Moth, a thief from a previous story, into his chief of police. In making Ahmad the Moth look foolish, Delilah the Wily plans to be given her deceased husband’s position as keeper of the royal pigeons. In the second part, Ali Quicksilver must sneak and cheat everyone to win the hand of Zainab the Cheat - he gets more than he barginned for with ex-theif turned fried fish seller, Zuraik. It’s a crazy story with a very satisfying ending, and these characters are now entered into the Haroun Al-Rashid group and pop up here and there.

There’s a part where Ali Quicksilver is turned into a donkey and taken to a house where the woman covers her face. The father asks why, as it’s only the two of them and she replies because there’s a strange man in the house. She then pours water in a bowl and says secretive words over it, which turns the donkey back into human. I only mention this because it’s a trope in many of the stories. When a man is turned into an animal, he will inevitably bump into a woman who sees through the spell and covers up. Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping a tally of how many times this happens, but it’s quite a few, and I enjoy it each time.

Review: A Thousand Nights and One Night (Volume 1) by J.C Mardrus and Powys Matthews

 As part of my short story summer, I decided to tackle a big beast, The Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, Arabian Nights Entertainment and, in my copy, The Thousand Nights and One Night. The tortured awkwardness of my title stemming from the fact that the book is a double translation with Arabic into French by J.C Mardrus and then into English by Edward Powys Mathers. It’s a four book set that claims it is ‘the only complete and accurate one in English’ but as I looked into it, that’s an impossible claim to make.

These stories come from everywhere, from India, through the middle-east and Arabic world, with sojourns into North Africa and then compiled into French with added Syrian stories (the most famous to me, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor all being additions to the collection) - then put into English. It’s a massive storybox from all over and accuracy seems to be a fool’s errand. I can only take what I’ve been presented and look at that.

The first volume sets up the famous frame story. The Sultan Shahryar has grown bitter after catching his wife cheating so he sleeps with a virgin every night and kills her in the morning. With the kingdom running out of virgins, his wazir’s daughter, Scheherazade is the next. She takes her little sister, Dunyazad who (peculiarly) watches them has sex before asking for a story. Scheherazade  begins it, but says she can only finish it if she’s allowed to live another day. By doing this, she lives for a thousand and one nights through her powers of storyteller. By the end of the first volume, Shahryar is warming to her a little and having vague thoughts of saving her life.

This first volume, in particular, has an awful lot of stories about people telling stories to save their lives. It also contains a great many nested stories - I’m not sure if they quite reach The Manuscript Found in Saragossa levels, but they come close. What I found really interesting is that nesting tales in this way serves a purpose within the frame narrative, if Scheherazade nests tales in each other, the resolution of one still leaves the others unresolved, and her head on her shoulders for another night.

One of the most striking thing about the book is how varied it is. There are comic tales, epic tales, romantic tales, family sagas and a whole lot more sex than I was expecting. There are brothers who ‘make lady’s parts explode’, long discussions of a man’s ‘zab’ and his ‘eggs’, the swaying hips, the round bottom. It’s a world where beautiful men and women seem to fall into sex at any time, often under the influence of wine and music. It’s also strong on bodily humour, people fart in fear, piddle themselves, find themselves locked in smelly toilets. Then there’s the violence, heads are frequently lopped off, malefactors impaled ‘from anus to mouth’, people staked out on the floor and beaten. At one point a jousting lance goes through a man and has his kidney at the end. It’s all to excess.

However, luxury and beauty are also in excess. Rosewater is sprinkled everywhere, nand is burnt, people are cleaned and rubbed and perfumed at the hamam. People are frequently given robes of honour, wear clothes of silk, cloth of gold, jewels all over. They drink water and sherberts flavoured by the same perfumes that were rubbed on them. There’s so much food, roasted sheep, kebabs, fruits, nuts, pastries - pastries galore, dripping in syrups - there’s a lot of jam talk. A higher class story will have characters expressing themselves in poetry like The Tale of Genji. When The Thousand Nights and One Night is in romantic or refined mode, it reminds me a lot of that book, then it will descend into low-brow, feculent Canterbury Tales or Gargantua and Pantagruel mode. I like both. 

Like those other books, this is also a set of stories that operate in a very different understanding of the world to now. There’s a lot of racism in the book, a black character is almost always oversexed and animalistic, even if they’re a eunuch. Jews and Christians are always the baddies in any story they are in, Persians often have access to arcane magic. It’s a world that runs on types. It’s also a world that is very comfortable with slavery, especially sexual slavery. There seems to be a rule about having no more than four wives, but as many sex slaves as can be afforded is fine. There also isn’t much difference between wife and slave, and those words are often used interchangeably. This is fine (in the text) because all women are up for it all the time and hunger for nothing more than a proud zab and love to attend the ‘weeping child’. Though it is also vital that ones own daughter is covered at all times and has her ‘precious treasure’ ever locked up.

This misogynistic element is inherent in the frame story. King Shahryar is cheated on, as is his brother. The two brothers go travelling to clear their heads and meet a sleeping jinni. The jinni has a concubine who forces them to sleep with her by threatening to wake the jinni if they don’t. She’s doing this to get back at the jinni and Shahryar concludes that if jinnis are being cheated on, he stands no chance. Yet there is a counterpoint in Scheherazade - though she does only tell her stories after sex.

It might be this misogyny that made me really fall in love with a particular character called Mother of Calamity. She appears in ‘The Tale of King Umar Al-Numan and his Two Remarkable Sons, Sharkan and Du AL-Makan’, a 238 page epic in the middle of this volume. The whole story is a family saga with lots of romance and strife. It’s set in a war between the Islamic countries and Christian Constantinople. Mother of Calamity is one of the christians. She’s a hideous old woman with a face like ‘an old man’s bottom’ and at one point does a far that ‘sends pebbles moving’.  She’s also shrewd, cunning and relentlessly set on revenge. She’s a baddie in the story, but a really enjoyable and delicious one. 

I also really liked the depiction of Christians in this story as it was different to what I’m used to. The Thousand Nights and One Night is set in a very Muslim world, where even ogresses worship Allah and birds know the al-fatihah, so the Christians barbarian invaders. While the Muslim soldiers go into battle after a wash and prayer, the Christians use ‘supreme incense of patriarchal excrements’, ground up patriarch shit. This shit isn’t even pure, as they get through so much that it has the shit of lesser clergymen mixed in. Needless to say, it doesn’t help the Christians and when they die their souls fly out their bowels and straight to hell. (In the second volume, a man explains how Christians don’t wash because a priest washed them when they were babies and don’t feel they need to again).

Another character I really enjoyed was the Barber of Baghdad. He’d popped up in another story where his garrulous ways had ruined another man’s life. He denies this, saying he’s the sensible one in his family and known as ‘the silent’ because he speaks so rarely and his words are always well chosen. He then goes on to tell about all his less sensible brothers, all while showing how talkative and foolish he really is.

There’s a story where a group of people all find themselves lumbered with a corpse and palm it off on someone else, till all of them are accused of the murder and have to tell stories to save their lives. There’s a detective tale where a wazir has to discover who murdered a woman chopped up and buried in a pot, on pain of his own life. There’s one about a fisherman tricking a genie back into a sealed pot. 

This volume consists of 644 pages of densely typed tales and there are another 1,698 pages to go.

Trip: A Day in Derby

During the summer holidays I took a day trip to Lincoln by train. I mostly went to mooch around the castle and spend some Waterstones vouchers in the remainders room they have there. As I was on the train, I looked at other destinations and wondered which of them would have the best 18th Century options - having not been to a good eighteenth century related thing for some time. 

Derby was the clear winner. The town that Bonnie Prince Charlie (shown above) reached before turning back during the '45 Jacobite rebellion, the town Erasmus Darwin ended up in after Lichfield, the home of the first modern factory, a silk mill founded in 1721 and the home of frequent 18th century science book jacket author, Joseph Wright of Derby.  

My first stop was at a little cafe for a fry up and a cup of tea. I knew it was the right place because it was full of old people and seemed to have a nice little community around it, then I found the Eagle bookshop. I can't walk past a second-hand bookshop so I popped in. One of the things I've said about moving to Grimsby is how the charity shops only seem to have those Catherine Cookson, working-class-woman-in-period-costume books. I may be seriously misguided, they may be great books, but they've never appealed to me. This shop was the motherlode of those kind of books, face after face of women in clogs. I didn't find anything for me there, but if you're after regency romance, they have a bookcase full.

 

My first museum was the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Not only does it hold a lot of Joseph Wright of Derby paintings, but it's also holding a special exhibition about his candlelight paintings that brings together many of them for the first time in 80 years. 

I didn't realise how large his An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery are, they dominated the room in which they were placed. I thought the writeup was very astute when it said, "Wright's fascination lay not in the scientific principle being demonstrated but in the spectacle of knowledge being kindled." There is a drama to the two paintings, especially the Air Pump which is extremely captivating and enticing. I also really liked the inclusion of a preparatory sketch, both in itself, the goofy unfinished quality of the faces and the fact it became part of the gallery as the payment in missed taxes. 

I was also struck by how the experimenter in both paintings has a similar red jacket, but in the Orrey painting, the experimenter is more dignified but in the Air Pump, he has a more alchemist air. Wright also painted an alchemist in a work with the wonderfully long title of, The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. It's another dramatic piece, with the titular alchemist glowing in the light of the phosphorus. There were also paintings of people studying sculptures by candlelight and a group of blacksmiths around a forge. The exhibition went into details about the origins of candlelit paintings, Wright's childhood interest in magic lanterns and the box he used to study lighting effects. It was really interesting.

The gallery itself also has a Wright room, featuring non-candlelit pictures, including a portrait of Erasmus Darwin and two that were inspired by Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. I definitely prefer the drama of the candle pictures, but I'd give the others house room.

The museum also includes a section of prehistoric Derby (or pre-Derby), with a mammoth tusk and a rhinoceros skeleton; some remnants of Roman era Derby and a few things from the tussle between the Mercians and the Grand Army of the Vikings. There's even a sarcophagus legendarily associated with the bones of St Alkmund, who was temporarily moved to Derby by Æthelflæd - oh, and a stuffed racing pigeon called The King of Rome.

Towards the back of the museum is a wooden panelled room telling the story of the '45 Jacobite rebellion. It contains a piece of Flora McDonald's dress and a model of eighteenth century Derby. Most peculiarly, the room is lined with the panels from the room where the decision was made to take the Jacobite army back to Scotland instead of moving on to London. Some photos of the museum include a mannequin of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I'm sad to say that's not there anymore. 

My next museum was the Pickford's House Museum. Originally built by Joseph Pickford, the designer of Wedgewood's House, Etruria Hall, it served as his home and showpiece. The rooms in the ground floor are decked out to show how the upwardly mobile Pickfords lived, with their drawing room, large entrance hallway and dining room with more Joseph Wright paintings.

It's a very nicely done house museum, although the kitchen doesn't have the standard regulation pretend food a lot of them have. One oddity is that the house contains a 1930s bathroom and an Edwardian bathroom that also serve as the toilets for the public. It did feel a lot like visiting someone's house. 

Things get weird on the second floor with a special exhibition about Lara Croft. I didn't realise that the Tomb Raider games were created in Derby, but the people of Derby definitely do. There are a number of rooms containing the computers used to code the game, props from the films and various models, magazine covers and posters of the star herself - though not a lot about how controversial the character was at times. There's also a chance to play the original game on PlayStation. I had it on PC and playing it here reminded me why I never got past the first level and why I don't play computer games. 

The top floor contains one of the country's largest collections of toy theatres (of course). The first production to be held in a Derby theatre was of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and it was also where the debut production of Dracula was held. While I enjoyed all three of my museum visits, Pickford's House was my favourite, it was quirky and charming.

My last museum was The Museum of Making, held in the Lombe's silk mill, it was opened in 2021 after a £17 million refurbishment. It's certainly the most impressive of the three museums to walk into, with a disassembled car and a Roll's Royce jet engine hanging from the ceiling.

The first gallery is about the mill itself, the result of industrial espionage, it was the first of the mills along the Derwent that later included Arkwright's famous mill. These buildings revolutionised the world, and the stretch of the river where they were built is now a Unesco world heritage site. The museum doesn't shy away from the child labour and environmental impact of these buildings either. The rest of gallery is a showcase of things built in and near Derby, from chimney pots to a mini nuclear reactor developed by Roll's Royce. It also features Erasmus Darwin's microscope and a copy of Flamsteed's map of the stars - with illustrations by Hogarth's father-in-law, James Thornhill.

The second floor holds 'assemblage'. Billed as "not your average museum display", it's a collection of objects organised by the material that made them. It struck me as a bit odds-n-sods, a jumble sale of random items. I asked the volunteer on the floor about it and they confirmed it was a space to put things.. many of them a little underwhelming - lots of chimney pots. I did very much enjoy the placement of these two railway signs though.

The third floor had a little exhibition that seems to mainly serve as an advertisement for the John Smedley company, who make £240 jumpers. The rest of the floor is a pay-to-entry hot decking area.

The Museum of Making is a very strikingly presented museum but I found it a little lacking. I think what it needed were more human stories. During Easter I went to the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet in Sheffield and that's crammed full of the stories of the people that worked there. The Museum of Making was a little colourless in comparison, especially after the utterly charming Pickford's House. 

All in all, I very much enjoyed my Derby trip and I recommend it as a very decent 18th century day out.