Vladimir Bartol: Alamut

     Revisiting this astonishing novel, which was second entry in this blog nearly eleven years ago… and only got a short write-up back then. It’s a fictionalisation – though backed by some careful historical research – of the story of the Ismaili sect of the hashishin or assassins which sowed chaos and wrecked the Seljuk rule in Persia at the end of the eleventh century. It’s also a study of power, and the uses of power, and is perhaps significant for being written in Slovenia in the late 1930s, a time when the heavy hand of absolute power lay over much of Europe.

Girls are bought and trained to become houris – the virgins who welcome male martyrs to paradise. Boys are trained in blind obedience to become fedayin, martyrs for the cause. And then via the use of hashish and trickery the boys are taken to visit paradise for a night, and then told that this will be their reward when they die for the cause.

Among all this there is much astute political reflection by Hassan, the leader of Alamut, the impregnable rocky mountain fortress of the assassins. How much can one actually know? Ultimate knowledge is impossible, for our senses lie to us. So, if we can know nothing then everything is permissible: power is the only thing that matters and that works, and the European leaders of the 1930s seemed well-versed in this. And the masses are afraid of uncertainty, and can be deluded with stories of other-worldly paradise after they die, to make up for the suffering in this world…

So is Hassan, the commander of Alamut, an evil genius? Power-crazed? He certainly understands how to trick and deceive, to manipulate, to achieve and maintain power. Yet, even as he succeeds and the rule of the Seljuks begins to crumble under his carefully-crafted attacks, even as he becomes master of worldly power, things do not go smoothly. Problems emerge with lovers and relationships, with friendships, with family, and all of these must give way to the remorseless logic of power; Hassan seems inhuman at times, and yet a deeper reflection belies this: the power of friendships, loyalty, values and integrity still speak out.

In the end, this time round, I experienced a much more powerful novel. At the same time as the achievement of ultimate power there emerged the question of, yes, but what for? There is no God, it is clear, who is interested in us and who will save us from ourselves – and this I found interesting given the novel’s background and setting in the Islamic world. Behind the politics and the religion is a really good and gripping and well-written novel, with many interesting and carefully-drawn characters; it’s no roman à thèse.

Hassan’s icy harshness, cruelty and iron discipline are chilling, and yet in his spirit of enquiry into meaning, he adopts and frees the feday who would have assassinated him, and sends him out into the world to continue the quest. He is enigmatic to the end, not completely understood even by those closest to him, even as they admire his success. And somewhere, behind it all, from the depths and darkness of the 1930s, Bartol has a message about his own times and its leaders…

Crazy literature for crazy times…

The craziness, rank insanity even, that seems to have gripped Britain and the US over the past months has shocked me deeply; it’s also recently set me scanning my bookshelves looking for the literature of strangeness, madness and insanity: and there’s plenty of it.

Let’s start with two novels whose narrators are both involuntarily interned in some kind of mental hospital, from which they tell their stories and communicate their opinions: Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, obviously, and Siegfried Lenz’ The German Lesson. Grass particularly, in all his work, was keen for Germany to come to terms with its horrendous history; the European project, flawed though it is, has been part of ensuring peaceful co-existence in our continent for several generations.

Two novels that present us with a world where insanity has taken over: the second volume of Anatoly Rybakov’s stunning Arbat trilogy, Fear, shows us the lives of a group of Muscovite students during the time of Stalin’s purges and show-trials, a world in which nothing makes sense and there is no way to save yourself if you have been randomly marked out for doom. Similarly, Jonathan Littell’s award-winning The Kindly Ones takes us inside the mind of a German intellectual who is one of those engaged in planning and carrying out the extermination of the Jews: we see how his work ‘makes sense’ to him inside his own Nazi bubble, and it’s the stuff of nightmares. Because these are both based on actual events, somehow Kafka’s The Trial pales a little alongside them, even though the inescapability of K’s situation is what really terrifies. But again, the Albanian Ismail Kadare’s novel The Palace of Dreams with its similar trope, is again rooted in reality, and gains more power from this.

It’s not only twentieth century writers who confront us with madness: Lear’s Fool has the licence to say anything, and tells the truth to power, and in the end dies for it; in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, there is business to be done and profit to be made from the selling of dead souls – non-existent serfs – in tsarist times. In Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol, a twentieth century writer who sets his tale back in mediaeval times, we are with the sect of the assassins, apparently so in the thrall of hashish that they are prepared to sacrifice their lives committing deeds ordered by their master, because the mythical heaven with its freely available virgins awaits them.

Ben Marcus, an American writer, approaches strangeness from another angle, removing the usual and commonly accepted sense and meaning from words and imbuing them with different ones, torturing our minds and creating a semi-hallucinatory effect in his narratives: The Age of Wire and String is a truly weird read, which you cannot take too much of at once… when even the language does not behave in the ways you expect, then we really are lost.

Perhaps the most horrific novel I can mention is by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago: Blindness. I believe it has been filmed and I’m not about to watch it. Gradually all the inhabitants of a city inexplicably go blind, and a world of chaos, violence, cruelty and insanity descends as people’s basest instincts are freed: it’s a kind of Lord of the Flies with grownups, on a grander scale. I persevered with it; it’s a very powerful read and one I’m not sure I will have the guts to go back to. In a final twist in the tale, it transpire the collective loss of sight is not permanent… 

Somehow, though, the most relevant text seems to me to be Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Here is a novel in which truth has no meaning: it’s not Pontius Pilate’s bland question ‘What is truth?’ but the malleability of any fact, idea or notion to serve the needs of those in power: now where have we met that recently? Winston Smith sits in his cubicle at his speakwrite making the news say whatever he is ordered to make it say, and removing all evidence of changes. How do we, can we, check the veracity of what we are told? Winston’s personal madness is that he sees the contradictions, remembers what was and it does him no good, just as it did no good telling voters that a certain candidate was a serial abuser of women, a narcissist and an inveterate liar… in such a world, O’Brien is right, Winston is the insane one. I find myself hoping that truth is not stranger than fiction… 

Vladimir Bartol: Alamut

I first came across the name ‘Alamut’, which was the fortress of the hashishin/assassins in mediaeval Persia, when I read Amin Maalouf’s beautiful novel ‘Samarkand’; this novel looks at the same place and time through the eyes of the poet Omar Khayyam. ‘Alamut’ is much darker, exploring how the myth of heaven with seventy virgins at your service as the reward for suicide warriors was first created and used. It is a novel, but Bartol does manage to take you right inside the mindset of the warriors, and also the man who realised the destructive potential available to him if he could manipulate vulnerable minds in this way.

Recent history in the Middle East and elsewhere is enlightened, and yet this novel, by a Slovenian writer I’d never heard of, was written and published before the Second World War. It’s well translated, nicely published, and a chilling read.