In this video we take a look at the 1983 cult classic The Arabian Nightmare, a dark, dreamy, Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy by British novelist and scholar Robert Irwin, who died earlier this year, at 77. This was his first novel, and the one he is still most famous for. He went on to write several more novels, as well as important nonfiction such as his fascinating history, The Arabian Nights: A Companion.
If William Beckford’s Vathek, which I discussed in my previous video, plays with the external tropes of the Arabian Nights—the frenetic plot turns, the over-the-top characters, and the exotic, stylized settings—then The Arabian Nightmare takes those elements and turns them inward, to explore the dreamworld—the Alam al-Mithal, the “world of living images”—and the fragmented and fragile nature of consciousness itself.
Our main character is Balian, a young Englishman who, in 1486, travels to Cairo to make a pilgrimage to St. Catherine’s in the Sinai Desert—but he’s also been commissioned by the French government to spy on Egyptian troop strengths and dispositions in Cairo. He travels with a group of westerners, each with their own motives for being there. Balian is a young man, a dreamer, who romanticizes his role as a spy: “Daydreams of hunts through underground sewers, hidden gateways, poisoned candle fumes and mysterious signals with scented handkerchiefs filled his mind; in his mind’s eye he stood at the center of a web of intrigue, plot and counter-plot.” That’s exactly what he gets—just not nearly in the way he envisions it.
No sooner has he arrived, then a Venetian painter in the group of travelers buys him a cup of tea, tells him an outrageous story, and then is suddenly arrested by Egyptian officers and hauled away. He leaves behind a book, written in Arabic, that has been partly translated into Italian, which Balian can read.
The selections that we read with Balian are cryptic statements about the Alam al-Mithal, an Arabic phrase that means “the world of similitudes” or the “realm of living images.” (The Alam al-Mithal appears in Dune as well—like Dune, The Arabian Nightmare draws from the deep well of Arabic language and Islamic history and imagery.) An example: “Some people say that every skull contains within itself its own sea of dreams and that there are millions upon millions of these tiny oceans.”
He reads only a few lines from this book—but it’s here that things start to go wrong for Balian. The Sultan’s officials won’t approve their visas for the journey to St. Catherine’s, so he must wait in Cairo. Initially he is pleased—this will give him an opportunity to spy—but soon finds that it is actually impossible to leave the city. Meanwhile, his dreams become increasingly more disturbing—and when he wakes, his nose is bleeding profusely. A fellow Englishman, the rogue and alchemist Michael Vane, examines him and says, “at least it is not the Arabian Nightmare.” But in denying it, he’s also suggesting it as a possibility.
Vane takes Balian to meet a sleep doctor he knows in the city—the Father of Cats—and on the way he tells him what the Arabian Nightmare is: “it comes to its victims every night, yet one of its properties is that it is never remembered in the morning. It is therefore the experiencing of infinite pain without the consciousness that one is doing so. Night after night of apparently endless torment and then in the morning the victim rises and goes about his daily business as if nothing had ever happened, and he looks forward to a good night’s sleep at the end of a hard day’s work. It is pure suffering, suffering that does not ennoble or teach, pointless suffering that changes nothing.”
Irwin’s 15th-century Cairo is fantastic—with vivid setting, cultural and period details. The heat is oppressive. It’s also increasingly fantastical, as you might expect in a book about dreams, and nightmares. As the days—and nights—drag on, Balian deteriorates.
This is not one of those books where “it was all just a dream” waves away all of the horrible events you’ve been reading about. No—the dream world impinges upon the real world, alters the real world—just as the real world alters our dream world—until it’s hard for Balian, and the reader, to determine whether he is awake, or asleep and dreaming. There are nested levels to a dream, sort of like in Inception—although I think Irwin does a better job of conveying the surreal paranoia and claustrophobia.
The Arabian Nightmare was essentially self-published, in 1983. The publisher, Dedalus Books, was founded by Geoffrey Smith, Eric Lane, and Robert Irwin. They launched their company on November 30, 1983, with the publication of The Arabian Nightmare and Smith’s vampire novel The Revenants, though he used a penname. Now, The Arabian Nightmare found an audience, and in 1987 it was reissued by The Viking Press in hardcover—British issue, American issue—with illustrations.
The illustrations are crappy black-and-white reproductions of David Roberts’s Cairo scenes from his famous book Egypt and the Holy Land, which is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s sort of appropriate, as Roberts visited and painted Cairo in the 19th-century—which is centuries after the events described in this novel, but he’s painting landmarks from that time period. His images are very precise, though, very clean. There is something of fantasy to them—but not of nightmare. Anyway, these are readily available for not too much money, as are paperback reprints. Paperback reprints generally do not include the illustrations.
Do I recommend The Arabian Nightmare? Absolutely. If you love mindbending novels, dark fantasy, historical/medieval settings, and don’t mind stories that get a little meta, I think you’ll love this. It’s got some sex, and some violence—as our dreams often do—and some of it shocking and disturbing—as our dreams often are—but nothing too explicit, or gratuitous. I’ve mentioned his nonfiction book The Arabian Nights: A Companion, which is great, and highly recommended as well. The Exquisite Corpse, his 1995 novel, and Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh, from 1997, are much more sexual. I did not reread these before making this video, but remember liking Exquisite Corpse quite a bit as well.
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