Review: Samak the Ayyar: A Tale of Ancient Persia

Samak the Ayyar: A Tale of Ancient Persia by Freydoon Rassouli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was... different.

A modern adaptation of a medieval Persian record of an epic oral tale, it follows the exploits of the title character, an ayyar - a kind of Persian ronin or ninja who also reminded me irresistibly of a D&D rogue (chaotic good alignment) or a swashbuckling hero of pulp fiction, not only in their ability to sneak into places and steal things but also because they are defenders of the common people, Robin Hood style. There's a great deal of getting over walls by using a lasso, putting sleeping powder in people's wine, daring disguises, and sudden fights in dark places.

The context is that a prince of Persia (this was originally going to be a tie-in to a new version of the video game Prince of Persia) has set out to marry the princess of the land of Chin, and this, by a convoluted series of events which honestly I've already forgotten, leads to a war between Chin and the neighboring kingdom of Machin.

As originally oral stories tend to do, the narrative then falls into a pattern (with considerable variation of detail, to be fair) that goes something like this:

1. Someone gets captured or kidnapped.
2. Samak goes after them, and through a combination of cleverness and fortuitously meeting exactly the person he needs to help him, manages to retrieve them, often also capturing their captor and/or stealing some treasure in the process.
3. This often incurs some kind of obligation to the helper (it's a "Yes, but," in improv terms) which then becomes a plot thread leading on past the completion of the sequence.
4. The kings, whose armies are drawn up facing each other, hear about Samak's success, and one of them writes a letter to the other. The messenger is received, given food and drink and entertained with music and dancing girls, then the vizier reads the message aloud (apparently Persian or Persianesque kings didn't read their own mail in this period).
5. The king reacts to events by deciding that it is on.
6. Champions from the respective armies challenge each other to single combat, and one of them defeats multiple opponents, remaining triumphant at the end of the day.

The sequence then repeats. This is varied by ambushes in which parts of the army are wiped out while moving from place to place; the occasional actual battle of the opposing armies when the champion vs champion turns nasty; reinforcements coming up from one place or another; and a number of side plots, mostly involving Samak's quests to fulfil his obligations to the people who helped him. It isn't all just formulaic, but it's formulaic enough that I became weary of the formula by the end.

Because of all these threads, and the large number of characters - far too many of whom are introduced as deus ex machina when Samak suddenly needs a conveniently loyal ally who can help with exactly the problem he has - and because a central driving force of the plot is the various relationships within the royal families, it becomes a bit like a soap opera, only with more stabbing.

This is the first of several projected volumes, and it ends still with plenty of plot threads to resolve. Although I did enjoy it - especially initially, when the experience was fresh - between the constant convenient helpers, the repetitious formula, and the large cast of mostly one-note characters I don't feel especially tempted to read future volumes.

I realize that a medieval Persian story inevitably won't match up to modern narrative expectations, and it's not really fair to expect this to succeed in today's terms (though it could almost have been a pulp serial from the 1930s). As an adaptation of a medieval tale, as far as I could judge it's done well, and the copy editing is mostly very good (even in the pre-release version I got from Netgalley for review). I enjoyed it in a similar way to the way I enjoyed reading a version of the Chinese classic Monkey: A Journey to the West , and for similar trickster-hero-related reasons.

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