“The Five Thousand and One Nights”

The title story in the Penelope Lively collection I read this week, The Five Thousand and One Nights, is certainly the most playful of the bunch. What happens to Scheherazade and the Sultan after the thousand and one nights? The Sultan is

Tamed by narrative. The sting drawn; the fires banked. He had revised his opinion of women. He loved his wife. He took a benign interest in his children. He hadn’t beheaded anyone in years. He was running to fat and looked rather less like Omar Sharif than he had done in his heyday. He drank a lot of coffee and watched videos and paid desultory attention to the family oil business.

And Scheherazade? She has continued her nightly narration throughout each night of their marriage, now numbering in the many thousands (the Sultan has lost count). But her stories have changed over the years, and the Sultan now finds himself nodding off in the middle.

The trouble was that the stories had got longer and longer and, in the Sultan’s opinion, a great deal less gripping. The backgrounds had become more and more exotic and the pace, in his view, slower and slower. The characters bewildered him: all these Elizas and Janes and Catherines. They talked and talked and nothing much happened except that occasionally there was a restrained social event or someone got married.

The poor Sultan finds himself asking Scheherazade where Devonshire is, and tells her sister that he particularly didn’t appreciate a story “that went on for weeks about people shouting at each other in some place called Yorkshire where they have the most appalling weather.” As the storyteller makes her way from Jane Austen through Emily Brontë to Virginia Woolf, the Sultan loses patience and the sister, Dinarzade, convinces him to try his own hand at narrating in the evenings.

And what does the Sultan narrate? Romances, adventures, westerns, science fiction. Scheherazade is unimpressed, but as the Sultan explains to Dinarzade, “Get the action right and the rest follows. You know—shooting things and bullfighting and catching enormous fish and getting drunk and behaving with amazing nonchalance when fatally wounded. I’ve got some terrific ideas. Marvellous stuff. Can’t fail.” And of course, the only love is doomed love.

Marvellous stuff!

Luckily there is a sweet and happy ending for the troubled couple that takes them right back to their roots.