A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (plus Marriage to the Sea has a cover!)
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A few weeks ago, I finally watched the film Three Thousand Years of Longing and afterward reread the source, A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. When I first encountered this book, I didn’t fall as wildly in love with it as I had with her Little Black Book of Stories, didn’t at that point sink into the density and delicious meandering of the mostly long stories in this volume, how they nourish and challenge the reader, the questions they raise. The title story/novella is about beauty and mortality, our relationship to art and storytelling, and how we try to make our lives meaningful.
Gillian, a British narratologist at peace with her life (her husband has left her and her children are grown), flies to Turkey for an academic conference. Wandering with her Turkish friend and colleague Orhan Rifat, she winds up buying an object that might be a hundred year old heirloom çesm-i bülbül bottle or might be a beautiful Venetian knock-off. It turns out to be the former, and the djinn inside wants to give her three wishes. Gillian, professional analyst of stories that she is, knows too much about how badly that can go. She stalls by asking for the djinn’s own history and how he came to be captured multiple times.
Gillian’s conference presentation is about Bocaccio’s/Petrarch’s/Chaucer’s Patient Griselda, who suffered terribly under her husband Walter’s cruel trials of her devotion, which included pretending to her that her children were dead while they were being raised elsewhere and having her wait on the young “wife” who he told her was replacing her. Gillian says to her audience that “the stories of women’s lives in fiction are the stories of stopped energies—the stories of Fanny Price, Lucy Snowe, even Gwendolen Harleth, are the stories of Griselda, and all come to that moment of strangling, willed oblivion.” (That sentence has no typos, btw—that’s syntax…) The men in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”—Orhan, a mysterious djinn acting as a freelance museum guide and history teacher, and the djinn himself—are all storytellers, intriguing and mostly sympathetic figures.
The movie gives us Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, two glorious pros who can do anything with their faces, bodies, and voices. So that’s satisfying. And the decision to go in a camp direction with their memories feels interesting. But George Miller, director of Mad Max: Fury Road, has made Gillian skinny, ascetic, desiring nothing, very unlike the Gillian of the book, and, since there’s a lot about women, size, fat, taking up room, etc., some of the scenes read very differently with Swinton as our POV character. He has left out much, as he had to, but unfortunately that includes Griselda, baked clay Venuses, ancient crone figures, Orhan’s lecture on misogyny and the role of the djinns in The Thousand and One Nights…the movie becomes about the awakening of Gillian’s desires and a newfound ability to wish. Her encounters with the supernatural go against her sense that science has rendered magic irrelevant (the apparent topic of her fairly banal lecture, which Swinton makes as crisp and interesting as possible).
In the process, the movie strips away Byatt’s exploration of beauty and decay, women’s bodies, women in folktales and mythology, Gillian’s longing for her youth, and her fear of her own mortality. Her nightmarish visions seem random in the movie, but in the book are very much connected to death and women and the body. She feels the people around her in Turkey as quite different from her, far more ideal (a romantic, problematic vision, but underneath it there’s a respectful sense of the individuality of each of the characters).
She also feels other to her middle-aged self. When her lovely Turkish companions urge her to make a wish, long before she tries to clean the bottle and so releases the djinn, she resists, but feels weighed down by her physical self:
They made Gillian Perholt feel hot, anglo-saxon, padded and clumsy. She was used to ignoring these feelings. She said, laughing,
‘I am enough of a narratologist to know that no good ever comes of making wishes. They have a habit of twisting the wishers to their own ends.’
At other moments, she, and the book, spend more time on her aging body, her view of herself. Here she’s in her hotel room, alone, about to watch a tennis match (I’m including about a paragraph and a half of what comes next: this is about 90 pages into a 177-page “story”…):
A live match (Becker-Leconte) was promised within an hour. She had time for a shower, she judged, a good hot shower, and then she could sit and dry slowly and watch the two men run. So she turned on the shower, which was large and brassy, behind a glass screen at one end of the bath, an enclosing screen of pleasing engraved climbing roses with little birds sitting amongst their thorny stems. It had a pleasant brass frame, the glass box. The water was a little cloudy, and a little brassy itself in colour, but it was hot, and Gillian disported herself in its jets, soaped her breasts, shampooed her hair, looked ruefully down at what it was better not to look at, the rolls of her midriff, the sagging muscles of her stomach. She remembered, as she reached for her towel, how perhaps ten years ago she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts, and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable. She had tried to imagine how this nice, taut, flexible skin would crimp and wrinkle and fall and had not been able to. It was her skin, it was herself, and there was no visible reason why it should not persist. She had known intellectually that it must, it must give way, but its liveliness then had given her the lie. And now it was all going, the eyelids had soft little folds, the edges of the lips were fuzzed, if she put on lipstick it ran in little threads into the surrounding skin.
She advanced naked towards the bathroom mirror in room 49 in the Peri Palas Hotel. The mirror was covered with shifting veils of steam, amongst which, vaguely, Gillian saw her death advancing towards her, its hair streaming dark and liquid, its eyeholes dark smudges, its mouth open in its liquescent face in fear of their convergence. She dropped her head sadly, turned aside from the encounter, and took out the hanging towelling robe from its transparent sheath of plastic. There were white towelling slippers in the cupboard with Peri Palas written on them in gold letters. She made herself a loose turban of a towel and thus solidly enveloped she remembered the çesm-i bülbül bottle and decided to run it under the tap, to bring the glass to life. She took it out of its wrappings-it was really very dusty, almost clay-encrusted – and carried it into the bathroom, where she turned on the mixer-tap in the basin, made the water warm, blood-heat, and held the bottle under the jet, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. She turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious dust-spots with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it gave a kind of warm leap in her hand, like a frog, like a still-beating heart in the hands of a surgeon. She gripped and clasped and steadied, and her own heart took a fierce, fast beat of apprehension, imagining blue glass splinters everywhere. But all that happened was that the stopper, with a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, into the basin. And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, thought Dr Perholt, following, and found she could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what she slowly made out to be an enormous foot…
Byatt’s language, usually lapidary and seductive, feels drier, more ordinary, as Gillian and the narrator look at her body: “the rolls of her midriff, the sagging muscles of her stomach,” “she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts, and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable.” A bit remote, almost cliched, though the rhythm of the sentences feels abundant, piling on these ordinary, upsetting descriptions. Possibly encouraging the reader’s resistance, though I’m not sure here what’s Byatt’s feeling, what Gillian’s.
But when Gillian touches the bottle, when she tries to clean off its crusted history, it comes alive in her hands, an animal, a “still-beating heart,” and all the descriptions and sentences become the wild, dark cloud she describes: “And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was?”
Exhilarating, one-of-a-kind language: Byatt pushes the description, the evocation of Gillian’s surprise, to the edges of legibility, bringing together the smells and feeling and sounds of something new and unknown.
In terms of her judgment of her own body, any of us with visible or invisible physical conditions might feel somewhat removed from her sense of emotional pain. Gillian is magnificently in shape for this strenuous conference and her travels. And anyone wrestling with life-threatening illness may feel this even more strongly. But Byatt explicitly connects Gillian’s feelings about her aging body as a response to mortality, rather than a lost dream of being appealing. In fact, we later learn that when Gillian was at her most beautiful, she was afraid of that beauty and felt endangered by it, for good reason.
Like the movie loosely based on this book, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is a love story, and though Gillian and the djinn come to love each other in ways both free and compelled, the great love story here lies elsewhere. Byatt and Gillian are obsessed with gorgeous objects and multisensory experience. In the end, this story becomes deliberately less about narrative expectations, the demands of story, and more about beauty—especially beauty created by humans: the thing perfect in itself, precious, fragile, and enchanting.
And speaking of gorgeous objects…
Marriage to the Sea has a cover! A fabulous cover. My editor, Ryan Murphy, author of Millbrook, The Redcoats, and Down with the Ship, deeply and intuitively understood the book during the editing process. (I’ve had great good fortune in the editors for my books, and that streak of luck continues with MTTS, which will be out in March 2026.) Ryan has created many other great Four Way Books covers. Which makes sense to me as I think about it. So many artists practice in multiple forms, and this cover feels like poetry to me.
The Delacroix painting, A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother, is in the Louvre and makes an appearance in the book. But I also feel that Ryan, with the image, the fonts, and the reversal, has caught the spirit of the book. Or the spirits, because there are many of them. These linked novellas (which might also be considered a novel that breaks in the middle) are full of theatrics, personal and professional, and also the playfulness and dangers of family intimacy. In the first novella, two sisters, Katya and Arielle, escape new grief into living out wild dreams in Paris. In the second, their aunt Julia, having fled Hollywood back to the experimental theater, embarks on a risky new marriage in Venice. Those who read Hungry Ghost Theater will recognize Katya, Arielle, and Julia in the new book. Marriage to the Sea stands alone, but if you haven’t yet read HGT, it definitely adds layers.
You can see how at home MTTS will be with the other Four Way Books titles—here’s the gallery. Possibly because they have a long, proud tradition of publishing wonderfully diverse books, FWB has been one of the targets of the May 2 attack on funding for arts organizations. So if you see a book you’d like, or are able to support them in some other way, that would be a beautiful thing to do.
And summer registration opens for the Stanford CS creative writing classes on May 19, 8:30 am. I’m teaching a mostly asynchronous (but with live group and individual Zooms) course on voice, style, dialogue, and point of view. Ron will be teaching a live online novel workshop for manuscripts in progress. There are a number of great classes opening up, so you might check them out if you or a friend want to write in community this summer while playing around with the art and craft and process of writing fiction (or poetry, memoir, creative nonfiction, etc.).
What’s Inspiring This Month
Very excited about a couple of brand-new books by writers I know and admire: Karen Bender’s The Words of Dr. L and Lori Ostlund’s Are You Happy? Because literary events are one of the things saving my sanity right now, those links go right to their events schedules. Maybe there’s one near you, or a virtual one, if for any reason your spirits could use a lift.
Also, below are links to a couple of upcoming virtual readings, both enticing and nearly overlapping, alas, but here they are, and maybe you can find a way to be at both of them, whether live or via recording:
Joanna Choi Kalbus’s The Boat Not Taken is coming out this month. I haven’t read this one yet, though I’ve ordered it, but friends have really loved it. Here’s a description: “In 1946, Joanna Choi’s mother came to the orphanage in Seoul, Korea to take her daughter home. They were going back to the tranquil hamlet where her life began in what is now North Korea. But when they found the boat for North Korea that day, the boatman slapped her mother’s face and refused to let the pair board the ship. Joanna’s life unfolded as it did because of the boat she and her mother did not take that day. It wasn’t until decades later, after her mother’s death, that Joanna returned to Korea and discovered the full unsettling story.” And you can find the link to a virtual launch, where Kalbus will be in conversation with Jimin Han, on May 15 at 5:30 pm here.
Also, this month’s Alta Online California Book Club selection is Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Thursday, May 15, 2025, 5 p.m. Pacific time. “[John] Freeman will lead a free hour-long conversation with Watkins, which will include a reading by her and questions from the audience. Joining them will be special guest Karen Russell, the acclaimed author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other books. Produced by Alta Journal for streaming on Zoom.” You can find essays about the book and info for the conversation with John Freeman here. (These events are recorded.)
It’s always a pleasure to hear what you’re reading—in the chat below or by email. In these increasingly unbelievable times, where are you finding comfort, inspiration, or clarity?