{"id":6703,"date":"2007-06-14T06:43:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-14T10:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6703"},"modified":"2015-05-08T07:48:19","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T11:48:19","slug":"the-books-the-djinn-in-the-nightingales-eye-the-story-of-the-eldest-princess-a-s-byatt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6703","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Djinn in the Nightingale\u2019s Eye\u201d \u2013 \u2018The Story of the Eldest Princess\u2019 (A.S. Byatt)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

\"c7281.jpg\"Next book on the shelf is yet another short story collection by AS Byatt (my favorite – obviously!) – this one is called The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – This excerpt is from “The Story of the Eldest Princess”.<\/p>\n

Fairy tales are often stories of quests, and in this one: a Princess is sent out, by her kingdom, on a quest. She is the oldest Princess of three, and her kingdom is benevolent and peaceful. But suddenly – for no discernible reason – the sky has become green, instead of blue. There is much consternation in the land. People look up, afraid, they blame the King and Queen for it. Priests are consulted. They say to repent. Generals are consulted. They advise attacking the neighboring kingdom. But an old wizard says that someone must be sent along the Road, thru the Forest, across the Desert, into the Mountains – to bring back the single silver bird and her nest. The bird was in a walled garden – surrounded by poisonous thorns and snakes … etc. You get the drill. It will be a terrifying dangerous quest. And whoever goes on this quest – must follow the directions exactly<\/i> (of course) – and not take any shortcuts. After a meeting of the family, the Eldest Princess says that she would be happy to go.<\/p>\n

So off she goes.<\/p>\n

Now the thing about this story (and the thing that makes this small collection of tales so special) is that – well, I guess you’d say there’s a postmodern TINGE here – just a tinge! In general, it’s a straight-up fairy story – but in the middle of it (and you’ll see in this excerpt) – the Princess begins to realize that she is in a tale. She recognizes the plot of her own story, so to speak … and … Well, it becomes (in its own way) a rumination on stories, and can we decide to be the authors of our own stories? What is Fate? Are we ruled by it? Do we have any say?<\/p>\n

I love how Byatt writes about these things. One of the reasons I cherish her stuff is that (unlike a lot of authors) – for some reason I take her stuff personally. It seems applicable to my life. There’s somthing about it. Or something about how she writes, and how she sees the world … I espeically felt this in the last story in this collection, the title story – but I’ll talk about that when I get to it.<\/p>\n

So here is the Eldest Princess.<\/p>\n


\nExcerpt from The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – “The Story of the Eldest Princess”.<\/b><\/p>\n

So she set out. They gave her a sword, and an inexhaustible water-bottle someone had brought back from another Quest, and a package of bread and qualis’ eggs and lettuce and pomegranates, which did not last very long. They all gathered at the city gate to wish her well, and a trumpeter blew a clear, silver sound into the emptiness ahead, and a minister produced a map of the Road, with one or two sketchy patches, especially in the Desert, where its undeviating track tended to be swallowed by sandstorms.<\/p>\n

The eldest Princess travelled quickly enough along the Road. Once or twice she thought she saw an old woman ahead of her, but this figure vanished at certain bends and slopes of the path, and did not reappear for some time, and then only briefly, so that it was never clear to the Princess whether there was one, or a succession of old women. In any case, if they were indeed, or she was indeed, an old woman, or old women, she or they were always very far ahead, and travelling extremely fast.<\/p>\n

The Forest stretched along the Road. Pale green glades along its edges, deeper rides, and dark tangled patches beyond these. The Princess could hear, but not see, birds calling and clattering and croaking in the trees. And occasional butterflies sailed briefly out of the glades towards the Road, busy small scarlet ones, lazily swooping midnight-blue ones, and once, a hand-sized transparent one, a shimmering film of wings with two golden eyes in the centre of the lower wing. This creature hovered over the Road, and seemed to follow the Princess for several minutes, but without ever crossing some invisible barrier between the Forest and the Road, When it dipped and turned back into the dappled light of the trees the Princess wanted to go after it, to walk on the grass and moss, and knew she must not. She felt a little hungry by now, although she had the inexhaustible water-bottle.<\/p>\n

She began to think. She was by nature a reading, not a travelling princess. This meant both that she enjoyed her new striding solitude in the fresh air, and that she had read a great many stories in her spare time, including several stories about princes and princesses who set out on Quests. What they all had in common, she thought to herself, was a pattern in which the two elder sisters, or brothers, set out very confidently, failed in one way or another, and were turned to stone, or imprisoned in vaults, or cast into magic sleep, until rescued by the third royal person, who did everything well, restored the first and the second, and fulfilled the Quest.<\/p>\n

She thought she would not like to waste seven years of her brief life as a statue or prisoner if it could be avoided.<\/p>\n

She thought that of course she could be vigilant, and very courteous to all passers-by – most elder princesses’ failings were failings of courtesy or over-confidence.<\/p>\n

There was nobody on the Road to whom she could be courteous, except the old woman, or women, bundling aong from time to time a long way ahead.<\/p>\n

She thought, I am in a pattern I know, and I suspect I have no power to break it, and I am going to meet a test and fail it, and spend seven years as a stone.<\/p>\n

This distressed her so much that she sat down on a convenient large stone at the side of the road and began to weep.<\/p>\n