Dervishes and Devilment
Three of the books I got for Christmas were by my fellow member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics Robert Irwin. Two novels and a memoir.
Robert is an expert on Arab history and culture and his Memoirs of a Dervish recounts his encounters with Sufism in the 60s when he was at university at Oxford. It is extremely honest and enlightening. Some reviewers have complained it is not a guide to Sufism, but it isn’t intended to be. Although he converted to Islam and saw some remarkable things which have informed his fiction – including the amazing The Arabian Nightmare – it is Robert looking back at his 20 something self with affection but a touch of surprise at who he was then and the journey he started in a decade that for most of us was not as swinging as legend would have us believe.
His youth certainly informs his two latest novels – The Runes Have Been Cast and Tom’s version. Like the author the protagonist of the first book attends Oxford and then teaches at St Andrews Universities. Both books feature largely the same cast and the shadow of the sinister academic Raven hangs over both. Both also feature a protagonist who is drawn into the more exciting stories of others. I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – another Oxford novel – where the protagonist has his life turned upside down by encounters with others.
In both books the characters are also haunted by ‘story’. What they read or write shapes who they become (literally in the case of the expert on Robert Louis Stevenson who has his leg amputated because of his admiration for Long John Silver) and Raven seeks to turn the lives of his pupils into stories with a clear narrative arc.
One reviewer of The Runes Have Been cast complained Irwin undermines the building tension of the first book in the last chapter. I think that is the point – lives are not like fiction and any attempt to force a shape on them – by ourselves or others – is an academic conceit.
Irwin is always worth reading and you will not regret reading any of these books.
