The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
For a child, listening to a fairy tale that began with “Once upon a time” and ended with “They lived happily ever after” meant reassurance, well-defined closure for characters who’d started the story on the edge of peril, fallen prey to misfortune and are eventually rescued by magical forces.
When you’re a child and time is marked by classes in school and rationed hours meant for play and rest, you don’t think too deeply about what “ever after” means.
In the title story of A S Byatt’s collection of fairy tales, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, (first published in 1994) the lead character, a narratologist named Gillian Perholt gives a presentation at an academic conference in Toronto on wish fulfilment and narrative fate: “‘In fairy tales,’ said Gillian, ‘those wishes that are granted and are not malign, or twisted towards destruction, tend to lead to a condition of beautiful stasis, more like a work of art than the drama of Fate.’”
What Gillian doesn’t tell the conference attendees is that she herself has brought with her, in a magical bottle she’d got in Istanbul, a djinn companion. The bottle, in Turkish, called a cesm-i bulbul or the nightingale’s eye, fascinates Gillian when she spots it in a curio shop. She collects glass paperweights — “she liked glass in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth”.
In the solitude of her hotel room, as a tennis match plays on TV, Gillian takes a hot shower and attempts to clean the bottle. The stopper comes out and “an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain” emerges that soon takes form first as an enormous foot and resolves after much shape-shifting to become a djinn, a being of fire hot to the touch.
What ensues between Gillian, a middle-aged academic who lives a solitary life immersed in analysing the power of storytelling, and this otherworldly being is an equal fascination for each other’s existence. High flirtation reveals personal histories and back-stories — on her part, a shorter life, on the djinn’s, one that spans hundreds of years and empires and kingdoms. I will say here it is a delight to read the conversational give and take between these two characters but it also sadly reinforces the lack of flirtatious conversation in contemporary life — truly an endangered skill these days.
Wishes are bestowed and granted. Love blossoms between these two, a kindling of emotion born of loneliness and the contemplation of time and desire.
There’s no neat bow at the end, no assurance of happily ever after (Byatt fills her fairy tales with magic and heat but knows how to ground them in human realities.) But the stories within stories and intertextuality make this tale swoon-worthy — no wonder George Miller couldn’t resist using this story as inspiration for his 2022 film Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton as the academic and Idris Elba as the djinn.
Two of the other stories in this collection, The Glass Coffin and Gode’s Story, originally appeared in Byatt’s Booker-winning novel, Possession. Although these stories are more conventional in form, Byatt’s characters exercise free will, are hyper-aware of their role in the narrative design and use their wit to beat what would have been their pre-destined fates. In The
Story of the Eldest Princess, the title character is sent on a quest and could have easily failed except she’s armed with bookish knowledge and wise companions so is able to break free from the usual dismal patterns of such stories.
And that, in the end, seems to be what Byatt wants to impress upon the reader: fates are not set in stone. We need to connect with each other and in those connections, find a way to live a life that isn’t just “floating redundant” as Gillian was before she met the djinn. Open that book, read that story, look at the world anew and let the magic in.
The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.
That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.