JUST AS STRANGE, BUT MUCH NASTIER

A really odd novel, which reads as though Alistair Horne's history of the Algerian War had been rewritten as pulp fiction. It contains the admirable phrase ‘the aesthetics of fascist philately’ – to which the rest of this review can be no more than a footnote.

I previously knew Robert Irwin only from the excellent anthology of classical Arabic literature he edited, Night and Horses and the Desert, and to discover that the academic behind that sober collection was also responsible for this insane and violent jaunt through wartime Algeria made the shock even greater. I'm going to try and sum it up, but bear in mind that's it's twice as weird as it sounds.

The setting is Algiers in 1959-60, with the French army several years into their nasty war with the nationalist FLN. The protagonist – ‘antihero’ is too weak a word for the monster at the centre of this book – is a French intelligence officer, a devotee of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques who is deeply involved with the shadowy world of double and triple agents. The plot consists of one cliffhanger after another, taking in prison breaks, desert sandstorms, femmes fatales, a man with no nose, a killer called ‘Teddybear’, the aforementioned right-wing stamp-collecting, scenes of sexual gunplay, and a production of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Our narrator, Captain Philippe Roussel, is a terrifying, patrickbatemanesque creation, who explains the most unpleasant scenes with a detached dry wit. The effect teeters on the line between funny and appalling, depending on how recently you ate and what kind of mood you're in. It is shockingly violent in places, which is not inappropriate given the setting – but the tone is very strange. It isn't presented entirely earnestly, but nor does it feel gratuitous – the historical detail is too rich and accurate. The whole thing starts to take on

the quality of a nightmare, where at any moment something just as strange, but much nastier might happen.

Irony, of a particularly dark and dare-I-say British kind, is ramped up to eleven throughout. Here is Philippe lost and alone in the vastness of the Sahara, thinking about the proclaimed unity of France, ‘whole and indivisible from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset’:

It is truly wonderful to me as I walk over and round these rolling and curving dunes, bleached of all colour by the noonday sun, that I am taking a walk in Metropolitan France. Over there to the left, one might see the mairie, a tabac, some cafés and a few old men playing pétanque during the lunch hour – only there is a very large sand dune in the way. And just ahead where I am walking now there is doubtless a vineyard, and a team of labourers clearing out a ditch. Oh! But there is an only slightly smaller sand dune in the way! Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, there is glorious, beautiful, prosperous, bustling France. One cannot see it, because of all the sand that is in the way, but it is there. Our legislators and map drawers tell us it is there, so it must be so.

It's a short book but it has a strangely oppressive atmosphere. I read the final couple of pages this afternoon on a plane as we came in to land at Algiers airport, and the novel had freaked me out so much that part of me didn't want to get off! But I think I'd recommend it, all the same. As long as you bring a strong stomach and a well-honed sense of irony, you should have plenty of tasteless fun. ( )

The Mysteries of Algiers has certain obvious points of intersection with Robert Irwin's other books: the Westerner involved in espionage in Islamic Africa is like the earlier Arabian Nightmare, and the maniacally ideological protagonist/narrator is akin to the later Exquisite Corpse. In this instance, the anti-hero fanatic is a Marxist revolutionary in French Algeria.

This one is probably the most violent of the author's novels that I've read. It is also the least overtly mystical. At the same time, Irwin doesn't miss the opportunity to emphasize the spectral icing on the Marxist cake. The touchstone quote of the volume is Marx from The German Ideology: "The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises." I still hardly understand what that means; what is the antecedent of "which"?

Still, Irwin keeps esoterically-minded readers like me paying attention with little nuggets like tacit quotation of Sufi saint Rabi'a ("The torch is for setting fire to Paradise and the water to extinguish the flames of hell," 123) and poking fun at the arch-Mahatma of Theosophy ("It is as if Koot Hoomi -- some great astral spirit -- was dictating nonsense to me," 138).

I realized while reading this novel that Irwin's fiction has much in common stylistically with that of Chuck Palahniuk. While American Palahniuk may be more plugged-in to the 21st-century Western zeitgeist, Englishman Irwin definitely has the edge in literary allusion and historical orientation. I wouldn't call The Mysteries of Algiers one of Irwin's best, but it's damned good just the same.