Independent on Sunday (London)
May 23, 2004, Sunday

BOOKS: HUNT THE LUSTY FUNDAMENTALIST;
A FAST-MOVING TURKISH FARCE DELIGHTS STEPHEN O’SHEA WITH ITS

by STEPHEN O’SHEA Snow on the shores of the Bosphorus near Turkey’s
Ortakoy mosque MURAD SEZER/AP

It comes as a surprise that political prescience should be yet
another of the many gifts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Praised as
a virtuoso of the postmodern highwire – in the company of Borges,
Calvino and Eco – Pamuk has delivered intellectual delights without
bothering his readers too much about the times in which they live. My
Name is Red, the Impac winner depicting a 16th-century aesthetic feud
among Ottoman miniaturists, was hailed as a work of idiosyncratic
genius, as was The White Castle, which involves a Muslim master and a
Christian slave switching identities. Now, with Snow, composed before
11 September 2001, Pamuk gives convincing proof that the solitary
artist is a better bellwether than any televised think-tanker.

Set in easternmost Anatolia in the 1990s, the novel deals with the
present- day shouting-match between East and West – a subject that is
second nature to any native of Istanbul like Pamuk. A meeting of
Noises Off and The Clash of Civilisations, the work is a melancholy
farce full of rabbit- out-of-a-hat plot twists that, despite its
locale, looks uncannily like the magic lantern show of misfire,
denial and pratfall that appears daily in our newspapers. How could
Pamuk have foreseen this at his writing desk four years ago? Even the
beatings and humiliations seem familiar.

The show takes place during three eventful February days in Kars, a
shivering has-been of a town hard by the border with Armenia. A
snowstorm has cut off the place, prompting an itinerant theatrical
troupe to stage a coup in the name of old-fashioned Kemalist secular
values. Their leader, a thoughtful drunk whose fame rests in his
resemblance to Ataturk, is concerned about militant Islamists and
Kurdish separatists in Kars, as well as a rash of suicides among the
city’s pious headscarf-wearing girls. Enter Ka, a poet returned from
exile in Germany, to report on the suicides for an article to appear
in “Republic” (ie Cumhurriyet), a leading Istanbul newspaper read by
Westernised “white Turks” like himself.

What Ka finds, as the snow settles on streets lined with dilapidated
Tsarist-era mansions, is a city of articulate rage. Angry at being
poor, provincial and despised by the godless, the townsfolk confront
Ka and disabuse him of his reflexive feelings of superiority, the
most memorable harangues spouted by a youth with dreams of becoming
“the world’s first Islamist science-fiction writer”. The Western
newcomer, who has spent the past 20 years not writing poetry,
masturbating, and collecting political refugee cheques in Frankfurt,
is enchanted at finding himself stuck in a tendentious backwater
straight out of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, to whom he refers liberally.
Ka’s muse returns and his libido revives.

At his hotel, run by an old socialist with two beautiful daughters,
the inevitable boulevardier complications arise, one of the love
triangles pitting the atheist poet against a lusty fundamentalist. Ka
goes out repeatedly to meet this hunted Islamist mastermind – who
came to national attention over the murder of a game-show host – to
negotiate matters political, sentimental, and, in the end,
theatrical: whether one of the inn-keeper’s daughters will remove her
headscarf on stage. As the intrigues mount and become ever more
deadly before the final betrayal, Pamuk gives us a florid wink by
letting his characters take a break every afternoon to watch a
Mexican soap opera on television.

In Turkey, the novel was criticised for its use of caricatures. Not
those of the foolish pasha of tired European travel writing, but the
Turk- on-Turk variety: the spent leftist, the brainless policeman,
the head- scarf passionaria, the miserable Anatolian. True, Pamuk
trades on stereotypes. But the strength of Snow lies in its failings.
The less believable the characters, the more true-to-life they
appear. It is to Pamuk’s credit that he saw this sad farce coming
before the rest of us.

Stephen O’Shea is the author of The Perfect Heresy’ (Profile). His
book on Islam and Christianity in the medieval Mediterranean world
will appear next year