I was going down a music rabbit hole in December, working up my year-end lists, when I saw that Laibach, the avant-garde Slovenian group who were especially influential on the industrial scene, had put out a new concept album called Alamut. It’s based on the Slovenian novel of that name, written by Vladimir Bartol, which (this is all stuff I learned in December) inspired the first Assassin’s Creed video game and one of the clans in the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Since I’d never read any Slovenian literature, I put in a request in our library system, and lo and behold, the Delaware Libraries have a copy.
Alamut is set at the fortress of that name, just south of the Caspian Sea in what is now northern Iran, in the 11th century, where a religious and military leader named Hassan-i Sabbah is building an army of fanatical assassins who’ll gladly die for his cause. He knows they will, because he has a diabolical plan to convince them that doing so will send them directly to the Islamic version of the afterlife: He’s built gardens behind his fortress and filled them with young women to act as houris, the women who appear in heaven to serve martyrs who died for the faith. He tricks the young men who are learning to become soldiers and assassins by doping a few of them with hashish, then having his eunuchs transport them to the gardens, where they wake up and think they’re in paradise – and that Hassan-i Sabbah, whom they call Sayyiduna, has the power to send them there.
The novel begins by following two characters in the fortress: Halima, a young woman whom Sabbah’s people purchased to serve in the gardens; and ibn Tahir, a young man whose family wanted him to join Sabbah’s garrison to serve as a fedai, a soldier who would give his life for the cause. We see both of them undergo “training,” while getting glimpses of some of the inner workings of the fortress and Sabbah’s command over it, although it’s not until closer to the midpoint of the book that his full plan becomes apparent. Once he has sent several of the fedayeen to his false paradise, he begins to use them, including sending ibn Tahir on a suicide mission to assassinate one of Sabbah’s enemies. Meanwhile, the young women are thrown into turmoil by the appearance and sudden disappearance of the young men, some of Sabbah’s advisers begin to question the wisdom of his plan, and a rival army shows up at the fortress, ready to lay siege to the place and starve the Sabbah’s people into submission.
Alamut is based on some historical truths; Sabbah was a real person who founded an order of assassins called the Hashashin, ruled a Shia Islamic state in the region of the fortress, and may even have been friends with Omar Khayyam. He was also a scholar and a schemer, fomenting insurgencies as far away as Syria. Bartol appears to have used this template to create a fictional analogue to a Slovene nationalist, anti-fascist movement of the 1930s called TIGR, who carried out bombings and assassinations against the Italian occupiers. With none of that historical or cultural knowledge, however, I read the novel on its own merits without understanding those metaphors, if that is what Bartol intended. The prose is somewhat dense, but the story picks up the pace as the novel goes along, with several unexpected twists. It ends with a few points unresolved, although it does adhere to the myth of Sabbah as the ascetic who seldom if ever left the castle through his reign.
I’d recommend Alamut, given how much I learned from it and the way the second half of the plot unfolds, but I also know I probably missed a lot, since I know very little of Slovene history and have almost no knowledge of Islam. I imagine it would also be more entertaining for anyone who’s played the games it ended up inspired, but as I never got into Assassin’s Creed (and am not going to – I’m afraid I’ll love it and get sucked in) I missed that context too.
Next up: I’m a few books on from this, but I’m currently reading the latest Booker Prize winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, which has a sparse, staccato prose style that reminds me of Hemingway’s.