When I did my reading and review of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors a while back, I kept finding critics who said it was too like Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Well, now I've read the first volume of New Arabian Nights, and I think the critics were really digging when they came up with that one. I'll explain why in a minute.
New Arabian Nights collects short stories that Stevenson wrote from 1877 through 1880. The collection was published in 1882, after Stevenson found others borrowing from his work. A note at the beginning states humorously:
"I must prefix a word of thanks to the gentleman who condescended to borrow the gist of one of my stories, and even to honour it with the addition of his signature. This mark of appreciation emboldened me to make the present collection."
This first volume collects seven stories into two main narratives, the first called "The Suicide Club" and the second called "The Rajah's Diamond." All of the stories involve one main character, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, either as a main or important side character. The prince loves going out in disguise and rubbing elbows with the commoners, and this leads him to a variety of adventures.
The story itself is very different from Three Impostors in tone, style, and plot. Pretty much the only thing Three Impostors borrowed is the nested short story structure, but Stevenson himself borrowed that from A Thousand and One Nights, so how can we blame Machen?
First off, the "stories" in this book aren't flashbacks. They're all present-time narratives, and there's no strong hint that any of our narrators are particularly unreliable. In Impostors, we knew from the beginning that the impostors were lying for ulterior motives.
The good guys in this book are actively trying to stop the bad guys, unlike Impostors in which the good guys were largely oblivious throughout the book.
That obliviousness and the exaggerated nature of the stories was the chief source of subtle humor in Impostors. In New Arabian Nights, the humor is more direct and more significant. Stevenson creates silly circumstances and puts characters with silly names and personalities into them. As for names, we get such masterpieces as "Silas Q. Scuddamore," "Geraldine Hammersmith" (or maybe the other way around?), "Charlie Pendragon" (quite a gap between those names!), and "Francis Scrymgeour" (if Stevenson knew how to pronounce that, he never told anyone).
We have characters being described as "an elderly young man," and lots of mock gravity. In one scene, Florizel tells a companion to be stealthy by saying, "You will have the kindness to maintain the strictest silence, and to conceal yourselves in the densest of the shadow."
It's quite funny, and seems to intend to be so, where Impostors was mostly funny indirectly.
The style is the typical late-1800s gentleman's adventure style, very different from Machen's detailed descriptions and near-poetic style. Stevenson uses a few words in ways that are either outdated or deliberately confusing, like "gratefully" to mean "something that is grating," as opposed to "someone who is grateful."
Also unlike Machen, Stevenson is a bit floppier with his descriptions of most characters. There were a few points where Stevenson introduced a character and I wondered if maybe this was a character from an earlier story making an appearance. Machen used very specific words so you always knew when you saw one of the impostors.
New Arabian Nights is more adventure/detective, too. As I mentioned above, it almost becomes a swashbuckler at one point, but then Stevenson makes the bizarre decision to skip the sword fight! Horror elements, where they're present, are effective but lack any of the supernatural elements suggested by Machen.
One other minor issue is that the multi-story structure moves things around way more than I expected. Instead of digging deep into his best ideas, Stevenson cuts things short and moves to a different story.
Overall, it was a nice, light read with some fun variation in the stories. The binding threads between the different stories are necessarily thin, which leads to a lack of depth, but the adventures were interesting and enjoyable and some of them rose to the level of introducing some very cool ideas or creating some very funny situations.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes old-school adventure stories. It's one of the most famous examples of this genre, and one of the earliest.
On the other hand, if you're looking for big, complex, over-arching plots and deep characters, you may want to give this one a wide berth. If you were hoping for horror stories like Machen's Impostors, you'll also be disappointed.
I'm looking forward to Volume 2, but I'm not champing at the bit for it!
Read it free here.
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