Date: 18.12.08
Journey: Northern Line from London Bridge to Kings Cross
Time: Late
Title: “Princess”
Author: ?
Synchronicity may be entirely the product of our bias toward narrative but never the less, as scientifically preposterous a concept as it is, it is a beautiful thing. Chance and fate had nothing to do with the fact that I turned up late for the Shooting People office party trip to see to the pantomime Aladdin. I turned up late because I stayed too long drinking with my brother at our Agent’s Christmas party. Where there is a bountiful supply of free wine you do not need a soothsayer to know that I am going to be delayed. Where the magic comes in is that, quite by chance, whilst buying a beer and waiting for the first half to finish so I could sneak in and enjoy the good natured racism of the second half, I turned to my ever trusty companion the London Review of Books and it fell open on a review of the newly released Penguin classic edition of 1001 Arabian Nights.
Before the applause started upstairs I soon discovered that, to my genuine and open astonishment, all the stories that we know most clearly from the 1001 Nights, Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, the one with the flying carpet, all have no historical source earlier than Antoine Galland’s original French translation of the late 17th Century. Though versions of all stories exist in Arabic all apparently show clear signs of being back translated from Galland. The framing device which pulls together all the tales of the 1001 Nights, the captured princess telling cliff hanging stories to save her life is quite traditional as are most of the stories Galland translated – but pretty much everything that I thought I knew about the cycle was probably invented by a Frenchman.
This made the second half of Aladdin a surprisingly rich metatexutal adventure. Though thankfully this didn’t detract any from the endless stream of filthy racist homophobic knob gags without which no panto would be complete.
But this synchronous coincidence set me thinking about the entirely fictional allure of the mysterious east, an allure that so appealed to the coffee house culture of 17th Century Paris and which still, clearly, carries an attraction today. A day later and I am once again on the London underground returning home after drinking myself stupid and I see the woman sat next to me is reading a thick black volume entitled simply “Princess”. The cover depicts a pair of beautiful eyes beneath a veil and it’s clear that the allure of the orient is alive and well in romantic fiction.
From the few pages I could read over her shoulder I found that our narrator, Princess, was in an unhappy union with Kareem. As she touches down in Saudi air space (yeah, I know you can’t touch down in air space but I didn’t write it) little does she know how her mother-in-law plots her demise…
Across from us both an Indian man is asleep and next to him an adult who looks all the world like a massive twelve year-old is engrossed in a book which seems ludicrously small in his huge fingers and is called “Sam Bourne”, the back of which declares boldly “Someone is killing good people – why?”
The same tone of naive outrage, so beloved by modern novelists, continues apace next to me in “Princess” where she only just found out that she is Kareem’s second marriage. Much is made of this and there is the heavy suggestion that the first Mrs.Kareem came to a sticky end.
Brilliantly at this point the author, who’s name I genuinely didn’t catch, decides to go for some balance. Having made it quite plain that Saudi Arabia is a satanic playground where dark-eyed innocent girls have no career path beyond being ravished and murdered she then sets out to be fair on the kidnapping rapists who make up the male population. “Although much is written about the misfortune of the women of Saudi Arabia the young men too suffer, though their lives are better they lack stimulation” and have “no cinema”.
It’s the sort of sublime gibberish that can keep me happy for months. That’s right, we can’t be too harsh on the murdering, kidnapping, raping monsters who smooth talk their way into the boudoirs of the west, since the poor buggers don’t have a multiplex between them. See it from their side for once can’t you goddamnit?
Antoine Galland has a lot to answer for.
