The Mysteries of Algiers

Posted on 27 September 2017 by Robert Irwin

In 1959 in Algiers, city of intrigue and disguises, the French settlers are making a last stand against the FLN liberation army For Philippe, a desert intelligence officer, survival means knowing the mind of the enemy But who is the enemy How to find him Entertaining and very nasty, this calculatedly intellectual comedy succeeds well as an unheroic quest starring Philippe, an interesting monster of disarming honesty The Listener It is a gruesome black comedy, whose blackness is so intense as to be almost unreadable if it weren t so well written. Time Out In a plot which snakes and twists, the reader cannot risk letting his concentration drop for a moment At times the death defying narrow escapes are firmly in the tradition of James Bondas well as being a rattling good yarn, this is a study of moral bankruptcy of those who pursue abstractions through violencevery successful. Times Literary Supplement What separates Irwin s story from the usual spy thrillers is not only his wit and satire but also his verbal pyrotechnics. The Washington Post Download The Mysteries of Algiers – kino-fada.fr JUST AS STRANGE, BUT MUCH NASTIERA really odd novel, which reads as though Alistair Horne s history of the Algerian War had been rewritten as pulp fiction It contains the admirable phrase the aesthetics of fascist philately to which the rest of this review can be nothan a footnote.I previously knew Robert Irwin only from the excellent anthology of classical Arabic literature he edited, Night and Horses and the Desert, and to discover that the academic behind that sober collection was JUST AS STRANGE, BUT MUCH NASTIERA really odd novel, which reads as though Alistair Horne s history of the Algerian War had been rewritten as pulp fiction It contains the admirable phrase the aesthetics of fascist philately to which the rest of this review can be nothan a footnote.I previously knew Robert Irwin only from the excellent anthology of classical Arabic literature he edited, Night and Horses and the Desert, and to discover that the academic behind that sober collection was also responsible for this insane and violent jaunt through wartime Algeria made the shock even greater I m going to try and sum it up, but bear in mind that s it s twice as weird as it sounds.The setting is Algiers in 1959 60, with the French army s...Philippe Roussel is a mercenary for hire embroiled in the Algerian revolution, working undercover against the French Though this story is well written, it is unremittingly dark Roussel is not a very sympathetic character, killing people nonchalantly while spouting Marxist philosophy, and few of the others he encounters in his travels are model citizens either The point being that revolution is a nasty business, I suppose, and in the end does anything really...Was excited to read a novel about Algeria before independence But this satire about ideologues, revolutionaries, and conservatives didn t appeal to me at all.

English
27 September 2017

Robert Irwin