Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
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Turkey is a borderland between the West and the Middle East, between Christianity and Islam, between modernity and tradition. If a modus vivendi between the Western liberalism and re-emergent Islam can be found, Turkey is the best place to look for it.
A better understanding of this enigmatic place would be a good reason to read these two novels which together span the 20th century from the closing days of the Ottoman Empire to Turkey’s modern role as a nation at the crossroads of two apparently very value systems.
Another, perhaps better, reason is that both books are marvelous.
In Snow, Orhan Pamuk takes us to the Turkey’s own borderlands: the town of Kars in Turkey’s Far East, pretty much beyond the pale as far as the more developed parts of Turkey are concerned. He is there, nominally, as a journalist to investigate a rash of suicides among Islamicist girls. He arrives just as a snowstorm seals Kars off from the rest of the world. While there, he re-encounters Ipek, a girl from his youth, with whom he now falls helplessly in love. While the military conducts a farcical but violent local coup, poems pop unbidden into Ka’s head (which makes him if there isn’t something to Islam after all), he acts an intermediary between the reactionary political and reactionary religious forces (there being little room for liberalism except in the faded and secluded drawings rooms of once cosmopolitan city).
So much for the story and politics. But this is Orhan Pamuk: this Kars exists in a parallel universe where coups are plotted by actors and carried on live television from the local theatre, where the television cables are strung through people’s living rooms, where the local newspaper (circulation 320) prints the day’s new before it happens, where poems pop fully-written into a poet’s head, where the main meeting place is The New Life Caf�, a name that recalls Pamuk’s last novel but one, A New Life.
Ka gets there through a snowstorm, a door that closes behind him. And once in Kars, the curious logic of the place takes over. Reality becomes what we perceive. And there is the tantalizing, enigmatic Ipek: only seen through Ka’s eyes, who sees what he wants to see or what he thinks he sees.
I won’t presume to state the message of Snow: I suspect it is one of those books which absorbs the reader’s own views and messages and reflects them back, subtly altered. The message I received back was that everything—religion, love, happiness, truth, reality—are ultimately matters of perception.
Louis de Bernieres rolls the clock back 30 years from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin to the years just before the First World War and tells the story of a great tragedy. In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Muslims, ethnic Greeks, Turks and Armenians live harmoniously in the town of Eskibahce near the southern Anatolian coast. The town is filled with de Bernieres characters: Philothei, a Christian girl so beautiful, her family forces her to wear a veil; a potter; the ice-man; a kindly Imam deeply attached to horse; a firebrand Greek schoolteacher trying vainly to instill a sense of national Greek identity; two friends, one Greek and one Turkish, who are nicknamed after birds; Rustem Bey, the local lord, who has his adulteress wife stones and who purchases a Greek courtesan masquerading as a Circassian; an Armenian apothecary.
The First World War brings calamity and suffering (de Bernieres tells the story of Gallipoli from the Turkish side) while the aftermath—the Greek invasion and other machinations—tear Eskibahce apart as the Armenians are slaughtered and the Turkish-speaking Greeks led off into exile to replaced by Greek-speaking Turks (or perhaps Muslim Greeks) from Crete.
The result, of course, was the modern and largely Western-looking nation-state of Turkey, a development that many would consider on the whole desirable. And there wasn’t much to admire in the latter-day Ottoman Empire, except perhaps in comparison with the bloodletting and cultural destruction that accompanied its passing.
But despotism aside, there was something appealing, and apparently lost forever, in the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural Ottoman Empire, a place of relative tolerance and relative civilization for a number of centuries. It has been replaced with something new, perhaps better, perhaps inevitable, perhaps more modern, but different.
Unlike the bittersweet Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, many readers’ introduction to de Bernieres, Birds Without Wings is rather more bitter than sweet, and doesn’t have such a neatly tied up ending. But Snow deals with broader swathes of history, and history is rarely neat.
Birds Without Wings is 625 pages long, without a boring page among them. I found it invited comparison with another long book—Tolstoy’s War and Peace — for both intertwine the political development of a nation forged in war with the trauma that war inflicts on individuals.