This is an archived version of this page. The current blog is here
Written in 1983, The Arabian Nightmare is a story containing many layers of stories and dreams within it. Set in fifteenth century Cairo, it is, on the surface at least, the story of Balian, an Englishman on a pilgrimage who falls prey to a disease of sleep which causes him to wake up with blood pouring out of his mouth and nose.
Balian becomes involved in a complex plot centred on the sinister sleep teacher known as the Father of Cats. As the book progresses, he finds it increasingly difficult to tell when he is asleep and dreaming and when he is awake. He comes to suspect that he may have the Arabian Nightmare, a condition in which the sufferer is tormented nightly in his dreams, but awakes remembering nothing.
The book uses many of the devices of post-modernism - an unreliable narrator, confusion of levels of reality, and a blurring of what is within the book and outside it. The techniques are skillfully applied however, and provide a real sense of a vicious infinity of stories within the book that will suck in the unwary. The atmosphere of medieval Cairo is also well evoked, and helped (in my Penguin edition at least) by illustrations by David Roberts, a nineteenth century artist who painted a Cairo that still looked much as it had in the fifteenth century.
Posted by MFreestone at December 3, 2003 04:21 PM