The year is 1486 and English pilgrim and spy, Balian of Norwich steps into the city of Cairo and out of time. He becomes a victim of the curse of the Arabian nightmare, and finds himself in the company of strange companions, and can no longer distinguish between dreaming and reality.
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
By Tinfoilhat
Format:Paperback
A book set in the Cairo of hundreds of years ago. The tale of a young English Pilgrim whose caravan travels through Cairo on the way to Jerusalem. Immediately he arrives in the city he is assailed by a form of insomnia which seems to give way to periods of narcoleptic unconsciousness in which his nightmares assume a vivid and tangible reality. These become progressively more disorientating, engulfing and traumatic - and whatever the condition causing them, it is clearly worsening. He has the Arabian Nightmare - a condition which gradually drives a man from his mind and inverts his real and imagined selves. As it becomes increasingly difficult for him to distinguish dream from waking state, the events unfolding in each start to impact and influence those in the other. For the reader, the confusion experienced by the protagonist is masterfully conveyed by the fact that the story is told by several different narrators in turn.
Despite all this, the book is not tiresome in the way that so many 'clever clever' books are ("Sound and the Fury" anyone? "Ulysses"?). Here you will be borne along by a pantheon of rich and varied characters: sinister arab mages, assassins, talking monkeys, David Lynch-esque dwarves, beautiful but deadly prostitutes, a dissipated mogul and his bored, prosmiscuous daughters; and many more.
Also, the settings are vivid and pungent and fascinating. Many are in the heads of the characters. The description of the caravanserai and the surrounding precincts of old Cairo, with their stench, over-crowding, disease and darkness, is claustrophobic and menacing. Yet, it is preferable to remain within their sweaty labrynthine warrens than to stray into the hinterland surrounding the great city, where this world and some other seem to merge...
Robert Irwin possesses - it seems to me - that rarest combination of qualities: a powerful intellect AND a gift for vivid and original storytelling which engages the reader viscerally. His works deserve far greater recognition than I think they have. He is certainly to be preferred to those "Pseuds' Corner" staples Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco. With Irwin you will find Eco's intellectual muscle in full measure, but also a tremendous capacity for weaving a compelling and enthralling story. Read this.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I was first attracted to this book by the references in the foreword to Calvino, Borges and the like - all writers for whom I have great respect. This book carries on that fine tradition of literary playfulness, monkeying around with the conventions of narrative and storytelling with an ease which is at once charming and breathtaking. Where this book really triumphs is in conveying the atmosphere of old Cairo - a city of mystery, dry sweat and moonlit deceit. The hero is a man lost to insomnia, condemned through the midnight hours to wander the narrow streets of a city in which he is a stranger, a city filled with fear and fictions in equal measure. The book is a tale of stories within stories, dreams within dreams - it has all the shiftless confusion of an uncertain nightmare combined with the easy grace of a child's fairytale. Irwin handles his storytelling with a deftness that always leaves the reader guessing - we echo the hero's wide-eyed wonder as we are led through a fantastical dreamscape of shifting stories which are funny and disturbing in equal measure. An excellent book which I would wholeheartedly recommend to any lovers of fiction. A book to keep you company through a sleepless night or two...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By T. Pearce
Format:Paperback
Sometimes the impression you're ultimately left with from a book is based on how well it fulfilled its early promise, or the hype that surrounded it. That's not really fair, I suppose, because the book's quality shouldn't really be based on your expectations. However, it was very difficult not to be extremely disappointed on finishing this book, precisely because I expected so much from it. The early chapters were everything the reviews promised. The conceit was indeed magnificent. There were some ideas here that will stay with me for a long time. But as the book progressed, things got more and more random and capricious, and there seemed to be less and less point. Plotlines and developments were picked up and dropped seemingly at random, and the novel's strong early sense of direction and meaningfulness petered out into nothing. Finally, everything is supposedly revealed in a few pages of exposition near the end.
I don't need a tidy resolution -- I recently loved Meyrinck's the Golem, for instance -- and I'm happy for the journey to be the point, but towards the end the journey seemed a real slog, and the muddled confusedness seemed to be the author losing control of what the story was and where it was going, or perhaps having too many ideas and not fully developing any one, rather than any reflection of the subject matter or any design. And that's a real shame, because this could have been a masterpiece. Overall, three stars covers it. It's still a worthwhile read overall, but I'd have been as happy giving up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through, maybe leaving like one of those unfinished dreams where you'll always wonder how it might have ended...
I don't need a tidy resolution -- I recently loved Meyrinck's the Golem, for instance -- and I'm happy for the journey to be the point, but towards the end the journey seemed a real slog, and the muddled confusedness seemed to be the author losing control of what the story was and where it was going, or perhaps having too many ideas and not fully developing any one, rather than any reflection of the subject matter or any design. And that's a real shame, because this could have been a masterpiece. Overall, three stars covers it. It's still a worthwhile read overall, but I'd have been as happy giving up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through, maybe leaving like one of those unfinished dreams where you'll always wonder how it might have ended...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Confusing but brilliant
Plot: I can't really summarise the plot because of how many stories run into each other and involve the same characters this makes any summary a little bit pointless. Read more
Published 24 days ago by Susan Rose
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful atmospheric novel
Beautiful atmospheric book - very evocative, like a lost book of the Arabian nights but with the odd modern anachronistic twist. Read more
Published on 4 Mar 2010 by Jezza
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy the Penguin!
All I can add to the previous reviews is, buy the Penguin edition which has beautiful illustrations by David Roberts.
Published on 20 Nov 2009 by R. Allen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams of Arabia
Irwin, a scholar of the Near east, has produced a novel of the Western dream of the orient. A strange, disturbing Orient of the mind. It's a long time favourite of mine. Read more
Published on 7 Oct 1999 by Maldoror
4.0 out of 5 stars
A page turning Arabian nights adventure
I bought this book many years ago. Loved it and have never sold it on or otherwise disposed of it. It is a nested story plot so and we follow the mystery through all the stories... Read more
Published on 13 April 1999
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