Abdolah presents this book as a free adaptation into modern Dutch of the book known in Iran as Kalila wa Demna, which is a Persian translation of an Arabic translation of a lost Pahlavi text based on the Indian classic, the Panchatantra, which is though to date back to around 300 BCE, and has often been proposed as the source of the animal fables collected by Aesop, La Fontaine, the Grimms, Kipling, etc., etc.

The book is a collection of fables told to a king by a wise Brahmin to illustrate important points of kingship, how to deal with human nature, how to avoid making silly errors (and how you can't avoid them sometimes), what happens when you trust the wrong advisers, and so on. The fables have a bewildering mix of human and animal characters - kings and viziers, lions and jackals, crows and tortoises - who often resort to telling each other fables to illustrate the points that they are making within their own stories, so we sometimes go down to the third or fourth level of narrative recursion before eventually resurfacing with the king and the Brahmin at the end of each chapter. You could take it at face value as a discourse on good government, a Machiavelli with talking jackals, but it seems to be written as much to entertain and amuse as to instruct. Especially since for every important moral point made, there seems to be another story saying the exact opposite somewhere else in the book...

Abdolah tells us that he's pruned out a lot of the Islamic accretions that found their way into the text through the Arabic translation, and he's presumably also condensed things a little and tightened up the structure, so it's a pleasant reading experience. He has put it into a fairly colloquial, everyday sort of Dutch, with just the odd fairy-tale flourish to remind us that we are in the remote Eastern past, but also with a few strategically placed anachronisms from the vocabulary of 21st-century government to prevent us getting too complaisant about that. The book is illustrated with copies of 20 or 30 woodcuts taken from an earlier Arabic version, but unfortunately these have wandered backwards and forwards quite a bit in the text as a result of the vagaries of book-production, so they rarely do much to enhance the text on the page. But they do add a suitable tone.

Great fun, and now I know exactly how to deal with the advice I get from my viziers next time we have a war with another animal species... ( )