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”?
At the same time, Irwin doesn’t miss the opportunity to emphasize the spectral icing on the Marxist cake. This one is probably the most violent of the author’s novels that I’ve read. In this instance, the anti-hero fanatic is a Marxist revolutionary in French Algeria. 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. He is also the editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam vol.Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Mysteries of Algiers by Robert Irwin. He is the author of ten works of non-fiction: The Middle East in the Middle Ages (1984), The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), The Alhambra (2004), For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Camel (2010), Mamluks and Crusaders (2010), Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (2010), and Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties (2011).
He has published six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997) and Satan Wants Me (1999). He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is the commissioning editor for The Times Literary Suupplement for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.
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