The Evening Standard (London)
June 28, 2004

A flightless turkey

by KATE CHISHOLM

Birds Without Wings
by Louis de Bernieres
(Secker, £17.99)

IT IS 10 years since Captain Corelli’s Mandolin crept its way into
the nation’s imagination.

Louis de Bernieres’s tale of love in a time of war on the Greek
island of Cephallonia has sold more than 2.5 million copies and in
2001 spawned the cheesy film starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz.

Now here comes another Mediterranean blockbuster, Birds Without
Wings. The setting this time is the small town of Eskibahce, on the
south-west coast of Turkey, at the end of the 19th century.

The Ottoman Empire, with Istanbul its exotic capital poised on the
Bosphorus between Europe and Asia Minor, is degenerating and the
great powers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia are lining up
like vultures to pick over the remains.

De Bernieres tells the story of the “heirs of Alexander and
Constantine, and Socrates” who are sent off to fight at Gallipoli,
and also of Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk, who in 1923 became first
president of the newly created state of Turkey.

Once again a rural idyll is punctured by the catastrophe of war. Once
again we find ourselves in the company of ingenious characters, such
as Rustem Bey, the “aga” or headman, a typical Turk with his red fez
and pomaded moustache; his oud-playing mistress, Leyla; Iskander the
potter and his son Karatavuk, who reports back from Gallipoli; the
heart-stopping Philothei and her childhood sweetheart Ibrahim.

Telltale signs that this is a De Bernieres novel are dotted
throughout: Mustafa Kemal is one of “Destiny’s men”; Philothei’s
beauty is so entrancing that those who succumb to it “receive a
lesson in fate”; in the midst of war it is possible to find something
to prove that “out of all the vileness, a small light still shines”.

In Captain Corelli such bouts of cod philosophy were offset by the
sharpness of observation; in Birds Without Wings there is not enough
fleshy reality to soak up the syrup.

We are introduced to so many characters in the first 100 pages or so
that it is difficult to remember who they all are or to care about
what happens to them.

In one dramatic chapter we hear about a Muslim family in which the
father orders one of his sons to kill his sister for consorting with
an ” infidel”.

It is an affecting scene, but we never hear of them again. The girl
and her plight are merely used as symbols to show the tyrannical hold
that honour has over such communities.

DE BERNIERES was inspired to write the story of Eskibahce after
visiting the town on which it is based, not far from Fethiye. It was
once a thriving community of Greeks and Turks, Christians and
Muslims, Armenians and Jews, living harmoniously together.

But the Armenians were massacred and after the First World War the
Greeks were sent back to their homeland.

The rest died in an earthquake-and only the ghostly outline of the
town survived.

In Birds Without Wings, De Bernieres is trying, he says, to write his
own version of War and Peace; to show how the people of Eskibahce
were affected by “shifts in history” over which they had no control.
It is an intriguing point of view: Gallipoli from the Turkish angle.
And there is nobility in his purpose.

But when Karatavuk (ie De Bernieres) finds himself in the trenches at
Gallipoli, writes, “My heart sinks at the thought of describing my
eight years of chaos and destruction in two separate wars”, you sort
of know what he means. How can such horror be described? But it also
provokes the response: why, then, should I go on reading?

Press on I did, to discover the fate of Ibrahim, bewitched by beauty
in the guise of Philothei; of Nilufer, the imam’s beloved horse; and
of Eskibahce, whose story is part of the forgotten tragedy of the
Greek and Turkish communities forcibly repatriated in the carve-up of
the old Ottoman Empire after 1918.

But it was a struggle. So much clotted history; so many characters to
care about, most of them classed among “the little people – bred to
docility and hierarchy”.

De Bernieres has said that he writes his books with “a built-in
mechanism for eliminating readers with poor concentration. I only
want determined readers”. I just wonder how many that will be this
time.

END

GRAPHIC: LOUIS DE BERNI RES: WE ARE INTRODUCED TO SO MANY CHARACTERS
IN THE FIRST 100 PAGES OR SO THAT IT IS DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER WHO
THEY ALL ARE OR TO CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM