Old Sins Cast Long Shadows: A Comment on F. Marion Crawford's KHALED, A TALE OF ARABIA.

The under appreciated F. Marion Crawford is one of my favorite 19th century authors of supernatural fiction. Naturally, when I stumbled across his Khaled, A Tale of Arabia, I absolutely had to read and comment upon it.

Khaled stood in the third heaven, which is the heaven of precious stones, and of Asrael, the angel of Death. In the midst of the light shed by the fruit of the trees Asrael himself is sitting, and will sit until the day of the resurrection from the dead, writing in his book the names of those who are to be born, and blotting out the names of those who have lived their years and must die. Each of the trees has seventy thousand branches, each branch bears seventy thousand fruits, each fruit is composed of seventy thousand diamonds, rubies, emeralds, carbuncles, jacinths, and other precious stones. The stature and proportions of Asrael are so great that his eyes are seventy thousand days' journey apart, the one from the other.

This commentary utilizes the 1971 edition of Khaled, A Tale of Arabia, part of "The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series," published by Ballantine Books. Originally published in 1891 by Macmillian & Co. in London and New York (see cover image below), Khaled is more a novella than novel coming in at 207 pages in the 1971 edition.

As often seems the case, I am finding that the blog Vintage Pop Fictions has an exemplary summary of this story. So, rather than quoting Vintage Pop Fictions in bulk, I will provide a link out to the excellent post (here). This is the second post I have written on a Crawford work. My own take on The Witch of Prague was posted on this blog July 26 (link here).

This work was of great interest to me for several reasons.

First, as I said above Crawford is an author who deserves far more credit than he has been given. Having had a cosmopolitan upbringing and drawn to the Orient, Crawford would spend years in India. In the introduction to the 1971 Ballantine edition, Lin Carter, himself a renowned author of fantasy and horror, said this of Crawford:

His taste for Oriental mysticism and the supernatural led him to the writing of a number of novels still remembered by fantasy collectors, such as Zoroaster, or the better-known novel of Gothic horror, The Witch of Prague (1891).

Second, the subject matter is so . . . out there, how could I not look into it? In fact, the love triangle dynamic between Khaled - who needed Zehovah in order to attain a soul, Zehovah the wife - who just wanted to be a good wife to Khaled and did not understand love, and Almasta the want-to-be-wife - who loved Khaled and wanted to be his wife so killed each of her husbands until only Khaled was available, is, frankly, bizarre. As I read through this book, the phrase that repeatedly came to mind was "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"[i]

Third, Khaled, A Tale of Arabia is the only work of fiction in the style of a fantastical, supernatural and Arabian-Nights-esque tale to my knowledge actually written in the 19th century that reflects Victorian society's abiding fascination with the mysteries of the Middle East.[ii]

This interest manifested itself on one hand, in Egyptology and Assyro-Babylonian studies and on the other hand, via Orientalist art, fashion and decor. Interestingly, religion, i.e. the study of Islam, was not really popular and not a significant part of this movement.

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