Shaharazad was the greatest storyteller that ever lived. Her narratives deferred her death – her stories quite literally saved her life, as she told them night after night for 1001 nights to entertain her brutal husband King Shahryar, stopping each night at a cliffhanger to ensure that Shahryar would let her live another day just so he could hear the end of the story. Shaharazad’s stories have always been a part of folklore, and in Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, acclaimed cultural historian Marina Warner closely examines 15 of these tales, their origins and their influences.

Warner accepts the formative importance of the Arabian Nights to storytelling, both in the Eastern and Western traditions. Her premise for Stranger Magic is simple – she wants to prove how Shahrazad’s tales have spawned a rich tradition all over the world and in order to do so, she examines them and their roots closely. The Arabian Nights themselves stemmed from a very diverse tradition of oral storytelling that spread across theMiddle EastandSouth Asia, making them a great deal more complicated than presumed in their original translations. Warner uses as her base a text translated by Antoine Galland in 1704, from which all subsequent European versions came from. Galland cleaned up a great deal of the raunchy, bawdy eroticism found in the Arabic versions, removed references to homosexuality and may even have made up the story of Ali Baba and Alladin, but it was a while before unexpurgated versions made their way out into the world. Warner, being an intelligent, interested academic removes nothing from the stories she retells, and so we find magic and mayhem side by side with tawdriness and bawdiness.

For many poets, writers, readers, storytellers and academics alike, and for generations, the Arabian Nights were a perfect manifestation of what the mystical East was about. These are the stories that spawned all the fantasies of doe-eyed harem girls, genies in bottles, living, magic flying carpets and rings with mystical powers. These are the stories whose influence is so diverse it is simply astounding – from Coleridge’s Kubai Khan, to Dickens’ Scrooge trying to capture the Ghost of Christmas Past in his candle like a genie in a bottle, to a talisman’s evoked by Sir Walter Scott – Warner makes it clear that the Nights have infiltrated the psyche of storytelling in many subtle, important ways. She does, however, make a constant attempt to remove her own perspectives from Orientalist fantasies, sometimes going as far as suggesting that they aren’t specifically Middle Eastern. She writes that the Nights ‘has no known author or named authors, no settled shape or length, no fixed table of contents, no definite birthplace or linguistic origin’.

The book is highly academic and intelligently written: it will probably become invaluable to researchers and academics. It does, however, tend towards incredibly diverse and frequent references – from Russian ballet choreography to A.S.Byatt, from ancient Zoroastrian beliefs to Edward Said. This, of course, makes the book not something that can be read casually – Warner never patronizes her reader, but often forgets that everyone may not be as well read as her.

Regardless, Stranger Magic is an epic, sprawling book clearly written with a great deal of love and attention to detail. Warner is firm in her belief that the Arabian Nights are seminal to all forms of contemporary storytelling, making it clear that the point of all stories is to ‘…to lift the shadows of rage and despair, bigotry and prejudice, to invite reflection – to give the princes and sultans of this world pause. This was – and is – Shahrazad’s way’.