Alamut

I thought to actually read the novel Assassin's Creed was inspired by after having learned about it last year. The book, Alamut by Slovenian Vladimir Bartol (1903 – 1967), turned out to have a Finnish translation (by Kari Klemelä). The covers had some background information like how the novel was mostly forgotten during Bartol's lifetime but was found again and became more widely known after the September 11 attacks.

Alamut is, according to the covers again, a collection of Bartol's thoughts and experiences with totalitarianism though I can't tell what those thoughts would be after reading it. I'm generally not great at interpreting meaning and intentions from fiction even if historical.

As prose, Alamut is not very entertaining. I don't know how much the translation affects it but at least one review I read mentioned that even in Slovenian the writing is clumsy. The novel spends an awful lot of time describing the daily lives of two characters -- Halima and ibn Tahir -- who arrive at the Alamut fortress for different purposes. Basically much of the novel is like a young adult novel about school. Later the novel shifts to whom is clearly the most important character, the master of Alamut, Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of Nizari Ismaili State.

Names, places, and religious disagreements among the conflicting factions of the region were largely meaningless to me and immediately forgotten. The most interesting part was when Hassan got to explaining his philosophical realizations and I suppose the tenets of Isma'ilism. Even with my low level understanding of their philosophies, I could see the Nietzsche and Plato in them.

The novel starts with its maxim, which at least per Alamut's Wikipedia article is: "Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted". In Finnish, the maxim is shorter and also word for word the English, alternative version familiar from the Assassin's Creed games: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted". The novel being a source of inspiration for the game is obvious even without the whole order of assassins. One important difference is how Ubisoft dropped the religious aspect from the Creed and made it purely philosophical.

There are neat common details like Masyaf having been one of the Nizari state's fortresses and Alamut meaning eagle's nest. Eagle is a common motif in the game series -- and I suppose birds in general due to their symbolism for freedom. 'Altaïr' and 'Ezio' as well (from its Greek 'Aetos', Latin 'Aetius' origins) mean eagle.

Hassan's big plan is to train unquestioning soldiers to eliminate key enemies of the state. An assassin (Ḥaššāšīn) is meant to die after accomplishing his goal to claim his alleged reward in Heaven, without realizing Hassan's deception. In the games dying would serve no purpose for the assassins but I still found it similar how escaping is always like a surprise, a complete afterthought once the target is dead. As if you were not supposed to survive.

Alamut also features an afterword by Slovenian cultural critic Aleš Debeljak (1961 – 2016) which points out how the novel's assassins are only after their target, not performing terrorist attacks against civilian targets. (A rule the games follow to the point of silliness in AC Valhalla in which you're not even an assassin!) Debeljak notes how people during Bartol's time read the novel in a completely different frame of reference than they do now. The afterword is a nice addition though oddly conflicting in tone with how it hypes up Slovenia but criticizes Slovenians' state of mind for reasons not quite clear to me.