Chasing his own tale
David Montrose
THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR by John Barth Hodder & Stoughton, £15.99, pp. 573 Among far too many other thing, John Barth's last (very fat) novel, The Tide- water Tales, materialised Scheherazade — matrix of The 1001 Nights — in Marylan'd, 1979, after which she attended the 11th annual convention of the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling. In Barth's new (merely fat) novel, the return leg of this exchange programme is enacted: while attempting the reverse of Tim Sev- erin's Sindbad Voyage (ie from Canton to Muscat), Simon William Behler — aka 'William Baylor', middle-aged author — goes down in stormy waters off southern Sri Lanka (the Serendib of Sindbad's sixth expedition) and regains consciousness aboard an eighth- century Arab boom car- rying Sindbad's beautiful daughter, Yas- min, to her princely bridegroom in Oman. Disaster soon intervenes, however: the ship is taken by pirates and Yasmin held to ransom.
But this episode does not arise, in flash- back, until over 400 pages into the novel, which, in typical Barthian manner, com- prises a story within two 'frames': a dying Baylor, temporally reinstated, tells of a dying Scheherazade's telling of his Arabian deeds. Her account begins with Sindbad, home front Serendib, striving both to muster a consortium to undertake a trade and diplomatic mission to that enchanted island and to negotiate a marriage for Yasmin. Difficult tasks, because Sindbad's seafaring companions tend not to survive and nobody believes that Yasmin's virginity remains intact, not even her original (and consequently ex-) intended. Those pirates, you know!
Disguised as a beggar, Baylor wangles himself into a feast for prospective investors and husbands, where he claims also to be a veteran of six epic voyages and persuades Sindbad that they should alternately recount each of their adventures over consecutive nights. Barth takes the opportunity to joke fun at old critical enemies: Baylor's fellow guests misunderstand his stories, praise and deplore for the wrong reasons, attack their 'fantasy' (`The high ground of traditional realism, brothers, is where I stand! Give me familiar, substantial stuff: rocs and rhinoceri, ifrits and genies and flying carpets. . . *), their lack of moral value — precisely the grounds on which Barth was attacked during the Seventies and early Eighties.
Between tales, Baylor is drawn into the proliferating schemes and rumours of Sind- bad's household, and two central puzzles emerge: what happened on the night before Sindbad's fifth voyage, when (long before the pirates' intrusion) Yasmin was not only deflowered, but impregnated besides; what happened on that fifth voyage, during which Sindbad's adopted son supposedly drowned? The emergence, and unravelling, are decidedly gradual because straightforward narration is not among Barth's borrowings from Scheherezade. He produces assorted gad- gets from his compendium of authorial games — unreliability, in several forms, being his favourite — before dusting off that venerable jack-in-the-box, the deus ex machina: the caliph, Haroun al Rashid, appears (disguised, naturally, as a beggar) and propels matters to an unfashionably neat denotement.
The Last Voyage harks back almost 20 years to Barth's last out-and-out critical success — the revamped myths of Chimera — and represents his lightest, least self- indulgent, least overreaching work for quite as long. And his most accessible. The elephantine sportiveness of Letters, Sabbatical and The Tidewater Tales has been curtailed, the studied preoccupation with fictionality too. Barth has even pruned the worst efflorescences of his style, that gabby mixture of near-mandarin and demotic which veers between the starchy and the downright slovenly — but not, alas, to the extent that the novel comes near to punching its weight. Another thing Barth has not borrowed is Scheherazade's concision.
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