Quentin Blake's The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor ; One Thousand and One Nights

Of all the glittering tales told in the Thousand and One Nights, perhaps the most problematic for the reteller is that of Sinbad the Sailor. The story is long and repetitive, and the temptation is either to leave it out altogether, as I did in my The Arabian Nights (Orchard, 1994) or drastically curtail it, as Brian Alderson did in his The Arabian Nights (Victor Gollancz, 1992).

Quentin Blake’s The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor cuts the story loose from the frame narrative of Sheherazade and the king, and lets the adventure-loving Sinbad the Sailor take all the time he needs to relay his highly-coloured escapades to that dull homebody, Sinbad the Porter. The book, first published in 1996, is exciting and action-packed. Despite his headline billing, it is not Quentin Blake’s sprightly but superficial illustrations that ensure its success, but John Yeoman’s vivid and well-judged text. Yeoman employs a beautifully onomatopoeic vocabulary – ‘gullet’, ‘slithered’, ‘suckled’, ‘nibble’ – to engage the reader directly in the sheer physicality of Sinbad’s shipwrecks and scrapes.

The model of Yeoman’s flexible and expressive prose has not been followed in C J Moore’s workmanlike retellings in One Thousand and One Nights. Here, the focus is all on Olga Dugina’s sumptuous, subtly-coloured illustrations, which have the static feel of Persian miniatures. Highly-finished and exquisite as these are, they lack something in vibrancy. Coupled with such a plodding text, the result is a curiously flat version of the Arabian Nights.

Readers may be disappointed, too, to find that in 1001 nights Sheherazade seemingly only had time to tell the king three stories: ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, ‘The Tale of the Ox and the Ass’, and ‘The Horse of Ebony’. Teachers and parents be warned that the second of these climaxes with a sturdy affirmation of the benefits of wife-beating: ‘When she arrived, he closed the door firmly, then taking the bunch of twigs, held them up before her. “Enough of your curiosity,” he cried, “and if you do not stop this nonsense about wanting to know my secret, I shall beat you black and blue.” On hearing this, the wife kissed his hand and begged his forgiveness...’ In the original, this story of the subjugation of women is told by the vizier to deter his daughter Sheherazade from marrying the king; here it is presented as if Sheherazade is herself telling it, in a subtle but important distortion of the source.