Marina’s latest book Stranger Magic is an examination of the Tales of the Arabian Nights. The famous Tales of the Arabian Nights is, of course, a collection of Indian and Persian folk tales structured elegantly around the highest possible stakes – a woman named Scheherezade tells stories in order to forestall her own execution. The Tales were collected by various individuals and probably assembled some time in the eighth century. The first European version was translated into French by Antoine Galland from an Arabic text in the early eighteenth century. Along with magnetic mountains, a city of brass and flying machines, they are about the magic of stories and the pleasure of the cliff-hanger. They bring to mind the claim of Vladimir Nabokov’s; that a good story must entertain, educate and enchant, each of which might be dispensed with at a pinch - except for enchantment. This the young Scheherezade surely feels more keenly than any ordinary story-teller, for failure to do so will result in her own death. Luckily, she is no ordinary story-teller and she manages, unnoticed by the sultan, to bear three children before her nights of tale-telling are over.
Marina spoke eloquently of the spread of the tales and the way their fixation on commerce and riches as rewards mirrored the tenor of the age and the concomitant spread of capitalism. There is, she noted dryly, a sort of product placement in effect in the repeated mentions of various goods and services. Also embedded within the narrative is a subversive counter-narrative which offers an alternative to the apparent misogyny of the umbrella story (all women are treacherous, untrustworthy - deserving only of death). Increasing in frequency through the stories are tales in which women are given more dynamic roles and Scheherezade herself is, of course, a heroic figure.
Of surprise to me was the fact that only one of the stories features a flying carpet – the motif that has most certainly come to represent the tales in popular imagination. More common are djinns of various tempers who do the bidding of their masters once released from the vials in which they have been imprisoned. This is, perhaps, rather like the creation of fiction itself – the writer releases certain spirits he hopes will more or less do one’s bidding. Although fictional characters don’t - as people sometimes like to think - assume lives of their own, they are occasionally somewhat slippery and difficult to manage. They must be managed carefully if they are to tell the story in the best possible way.
Chris Womersley
Writer-in-Residence
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