Fantasy with one foot on the ground
Patricia Craig
THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE by A. S. Byatt Chatto & W7ndus, &9,99, pp. 280 It's strange to find A. S. Byatt writing fairy stories — almost as if Anita Brookner had taken to smut. The author of The Vir- gin in the Garden and so forth was a realist in the Middlemarch tradition, never a Carteresque fantasist. It's true that Posses- sion contained excursions into other forms of writing — indeed, two of the stories col- lected here were originally incorporated into that monumental (and magnificent) work — but those were the bits of the novel that readers tended to skip. What, they might have wondered, had A. S. Byatt to do with sleeping beauties and black magicians? What drove the civilised chroni- cler of scholarly and social goings-on to talking scorpions in the mould of E. Nes bit's Psammead, little grey men and princesses' quests? And what has made her carry on with them?
Whatever the impulse behind these sto- ries, it's not just a matter of putting old djinns into new bottles — though that comes into it too; as with all reworkings of traditional material, it's the implications for the present time that provide the maxi- mum animation. The most substantial piece in this collection, the title story which actually does concern the release of a djinn from a bottle in a hotel room in Istanbul — turns out to be less a fairy story proper than a detailed and trenchant com- mentary on that entire genre, both Oriental and Occidental, and on many aspects of story-telling. It is also a story about the ter- rors of ageing, and about the various shapes imposed on women's lives.
It's constructed like the pie in the nurs- ery rhyme: realism on the outside, artifice (four-and-twenty singing blackbirds) with- in. Gillian Perholt (it can't be an accident that the name is so close to Perrault) is the middle-aged academic, attending a confer- ence of narratologists — whatever those are — who goes from scholar to magic sub- ject in the twinkle of a nightingale's eye. (Nightingale's eye' is a type of glass, the glass of a bottle containing a pent-up force.) Having released her djinn, the first thing Dr Perholt wishes for is the restora- tion of a youthful appearance — nothing too extreme, just the looks of a thirty-five- year-old. (Are we meant to take this as an instance of getting youth out of a bottle?) It's significant — indeed, very little is insignificant in this intricate undertaking it's significant that Dr Perholt has acquired her bottle from a Turkish expert on Yeats and Byzantium: 'That is no country for old men', we remember the opening line of `Sailing to Byzantium' goes. Or old women, for that matter — but soon the rejuvenated Dr Perholt is lying in the arms of the djinn, which after all is the proper ending of the prose or verse romance, whatever degree of metamorphosis is required to achieve it. Not that A. S. Byatt's story ends here: the possibilities for Gillian Perholt are left open, and the story-telling within the nar- rative continues. It continues: indeed, at times you feel you're being bombarded with endless ornamental parables — nearly the whole of the thousand-and-one tales.
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye is a cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas. For all its proliferation of marvels and metaphors, it keeps at least one foot on the ground — a serviceable English foot. I am not sure that the fairy tale, the flight of fancy, is a medium that really suits this author: but with the title story here, at least, she has adapted it splendidly to her own ends. Where else, for example, would you find a heroine, whom magic is about to touch, wishing (as a kind of preliminary to the three important wishes the djinn is bound to grant) — wishing for an invitation to deliver the keynote address to a gather- ing of narratologists in Toronto?
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