![]() "I thought I might use it for spells and didn't know I would ever use it in a novel. He bought a copy of the master's Magic in Theory and Practice in Oxford in 1965. "Magic and language are intensely bound up with each other it's a running theme in my novel." ![]() ![]() In Satan Wants Me, about a Sixties hippy who falls in with the occult, Irwin quotes Aleister Crowley: "magic is a disease of language." "Crowley was an intelligent man," he comments. Like Irwin's other novels, it has a suggestion of the conjuror's performance, of fiction as a series of secret worlds opening one into another. ![]() Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh returned to the medieval Middle East, with an erotically-charged Topkapi harem and its sexual delusions. "All my novels are about madness of one kind or another - obsession, delusion, drunkenness." The Limits of Vision was born out of domestic claustrophobia: a housewife obsessed with dust finds herself conversing with great minds of the past, such as Leonardo and Darwin, in an imaginative investigation of suburban psychopathology. The novels have been varied in settings and subjects, but certain themes run through them all. That was 20 years ago, and he has now carved out an interlinked career in both departments, fiction and Arabic studies. ![]()
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