Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange contains 18 stories from the Arab world, originating in the 10th century, which have survived in a single manuscript in a library in Istanbul. While a German volume appeared in 1933, this elegant, block-bound Penguin edition is the first English version of these tales, in a delightfully unstuffy translation by Malcolm C Lyons and with a sensitive introduction to their cultural and literary context by the Arabist Robert Irwin.

Six of these stories were later included in the Arabian Nights, but the rest are new to us. Composed to fascinate and titillate, they are neither folk tales nor morality tales but early and enjoyable examples of pulp fiction, and should, Irwin contends, properly be classed as literature. And make no mistake, they are both marvellous and very, very strange. Featuring monsters, jinn, feckless princes, capricious princesses, wily viziers, concealed treasure and dramatic reversals of fortune, they offer a glimpse of a world whose oddness has simply been accentuated by the passing of the centuries.

The variety of the tales – a mix of comedy, fantasy and derring-do – is instantly appealing, as is their headlong narrative drive. Unlike the stories of the Arabian Nights (in which Scheherazade’s talking for her life is the thread on which the collection is hung) they have no unifying frame, and profess no didactic purpose. If there is a common element to them it is that they are almost all concerned to a greater or lesser degree with sexual or romantic love. They seem sensual, capriciously violent and more than a touch repetitive, rather like a medieval Fifty Shades of Grey.

Take “The Story of the Forty Girls and What Happened to Them with the Prince”, in which a Persian prince stumbles across an enchanted castle run by a sorceress and her troop of warlike female cousins. Divested of their armour, the girls prove to be “more beautiful than the houris of Paradise”, and queue up to enjoy his favours (naturally they are all virgins). Finally the sorceress offers herself to him, forbidding the prince – who is impressively not yet exhausted – from approaching any of the others again on pain of being imprisoned, tortured and loaded with iron chains; conditions to which he cheerfully agrees. That’s 40 couplings, and then some, since the sorceress, having miraculously regained her virginity, presents herself for a second deflowering.

“The Story of Sul and Shumul” is more idealistic but has a similar Groundhog Day quality. Here the lovers, two teenage cousins, are fiercely chaste, preferring “to talk and recite poetry” all night, after which they part “with no suspicion of indecency attaching to them”. They are, of course, star-crossed, for no more obvious reason than that Sul seems incapable of pulling himself together and proposing to Shumul. Whenever he receives a letter from her (and there are many, written in the high-flown poetic style to which both are partial) he falls down in a faint. In fact Sul spends so much of the narrative wheeling between tears and verse that Shumul’s exasperated father exclaims: “I don’t know whether he wants this marriage or not.”

We look in vain for the signs of an early modern psychology in the actions of the vacillating, fainting Sul: his behaviour, like that of the priapic Persian prince, is the product of an erotic literary convention. This is also true of the book’s many beautiful but scheming female characters, for Tales of the Marvellous is undeniably misogynistic. As a character in AS Byatt’s story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (1994) observes, the sad fact remains that for the most part women in such pre-modern Arabic stories “are portrayed as deceitful, unreliable, greedy, inordinate in their desires, unprincipled and dangerous, operating powerfully (apart from sorceresses and female ghouls and ogres) through structures of powerlessness”.

In other words, women who are judged by their bodies must live and die by their bodies. Perhaps the best example here is the gloriously psychopathic Arus al-‘Ara’is, the antiheroine of “The Story of Arus al-‘Ara’is and her Deceit”, who meets a gory end after a vicious career as a femme fatale. Arus uses sex as a deadly weapon, copulating with mortals and jinn alike, and killing her lovers when the occasion demands. Yet she sets herself up as a seductress only because, as a young girl, she is herself tricked and seduced by a man, and she remains remarkably frank throughout about her propensity for dishonesty. At the beginning of the story we meet one of her former victims, a jailbird who has been imprisoned for assaulting a woman and attempting to rape his own mother. Tellingly, Arus is still presented, within the tale’s moral framework, as the more wicked of the two.

Equally terrifying is the monomaniacal Mahliya in “The Story of Mahliya and Maubub”. A Christian Egyptian princess, Mahliya goes to mass and displays conventionally demure forms of piety. But no sooner has she set eyes on the dishy Maubub in church than she begins to pursue him obsessively, insinuating herself into his tent disguised as her own vizier, and later becoming so jealous when she suspects him (wrongly, as it happens) of infidelity that she crucifies his messengers. In what must count as a particularly unfortunate instance of a lovers’ quarrel, the two finally confront each other on the battlefield, where Maubub prepares to attack his beloved with an army that includes lions and elephants, while Mahliya has mustered “4,000 buffaloes with their horns covered in iron and their necks protected by collars of Chinese steel” – and, aptly, 5,000 wildcats. Unsurprisingly, Mahliya wins.

In spite of such over-the-top passions, there is often a mournful countercurrent to these baroque tales. It is especially evident in those stories that involve a search for hidden treasure (matalib, the “science” of treasure hunting, was an established genre of writing, and there was even a guild of medieval Egyptian treasure-hunters, motivated by a wish to discover what had happened to the fabled wealth of the ancient Greeks and Romans). In Tales of the Marvellous the treasure hunter typically has to grapple with cryptic clues, magic spells, guardian monsters and death-dealing automata. We might well wonder, like the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, why anyone who “hoards his money and seals it with magical operations, thus making extraordinary efforts to keep it concealed”, would also “set up hints and clues as to how it may be found by anyone who cares to” – nevertheless, the stories are rollicking illustrations of the principle that who dares, wins.

“The Story of the Four Hidden Treasures” is fairly typical in being an Indiana Jones-like romp, in four quests, for fabulous riches guarded, among other grotesques, by a bird with a body bigger than an elephant’s, lascivious mermaids and moving statues that function in every way like robots. As well as boasting some eerily convincing details – on spending the night with the mermaids, the treasure hunters find that “the only difference between them and our own women was that their skins had the roughness of small shells” – the tale gives us a poignant insight into the medieval Arab obsession with a lost past. As those robotic statues suggest, medieval storytellers thought of advanced technology not as something that might be realised in the future, but as one of the secrets that vanished with the ancients.

As a result, these perky quest stories finally leave us with an uncomfortable sense of the transience of human achievement. The point is driven home when the treasure hunters on the Second Quest come across a corpse with a tablet of green topaz at its head, bearing the inscription “I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me take heed, for Time is not to be trusted.” The tale concludes with this pitiful vision of human life as brief, frail and hopelessly invested in ephemera.

Like all pulp fiction, however, the stories in this collection are, above all, fun, and when approaching them, in order to avoid what the social historian EP Thompson has called “the enormous condescension of posterity”, it is as well to suspend both our contemporary sensitivities and our disbelief. Here Irwin shows us the way. His introduction alludes matter-of-factly to an incident in which, as a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria, he “once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat”. What a pity that tale isn’t included here.

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