The Garden of Forking Paths

Philip Guedalla informs us that the novel The Approach to al-Mu'tasim by the Bombay barrister Mir Bahadur Ali "is a rather uneasy combination of those Islamic allegories which never fail to impress their own translators, and of that brand of detective stories which inevitably outdoes even Dr. Watson and heightens the horror of human life as it is found in the most respectable boardinghouses of Brighton. " Before him, Mr. Cecil Roberts had blasted Bahadur's book for "its unaccountable double influence of Wilkie Collins and of the famed twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar"-a simple enough observation which Guedalla merely parrots, though in a more angry jargon. Essentially, both reviewers are in agreement, pointing out the book's detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism. This hybridization may lead us to suspect a certain kinship with Chesterton; we shall presently find out, however, that no such affinity exists.

The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu'tasim appeared in Bombay toward the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu'tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission-perhaps merciful-of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am led to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.