The Guardian, UK
July 10 2004

Hacked flesh and great ideas

James Buchan assesses an epic engagement with the aftermath of the
Ottoman empire in Louis de Bernières’s Birds Without Wings
Read an interview with Louis de Bernières

Buy Birds Without Wings at Amazon.co.uk

Birds Without Wings Louis de Bernières
625pp, Secker & Warburg,
£17.99
The destruction of the Ottoman empire in the first world war and its
aftermath put an end to a tradition of religious and ethnic tolerance
in Asia Minor, the Balkans and the Arab lands. In place of the
corrupt but uninquisitive old order, a half-domesticated nationalism
ruined the old cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean –
Istanbul, Salonika, Smyrna, Beirut, Alexandria – broke up any
affinities between Muslims, Christians and Jews, and undermined every
effort to establish liberal and prosperous states. There has been a
century of war.

Romantic nostalgia for a lost world of pashas and cohabitation
prompted Lawrence Durrell to write The Alexandria Quartet of 1957-60.
A brilliant and overdue Levantine society worked out its destiny in
prose as honeyed and indigestible as Oriental confectionery. The
swansong of exotic English literary modernism, The Alexandria Quartet
is now the deadest of dead dogs.

Louis de Bernières has chosen in place of a sophisticated commercial
city of the 1930s a picturesque village on the Lycian coast in about
1900. This is Eskibahce, now just another ghost town on Turkey’s
southern shore but once a place where Christians and Muslims lived in
friendly intimacy, illiterate in both Greek and Turkish, and more
alike than they knew. A beautiful Christian girl makes veiling all
the rage, while the village molla halts the stoning of an adulteress
by appealing not merely to the sharia but to the doctrines of Jesus,
son of Mary. It is a place, as one might expect from De Bernières,
that is folksy, capricious, sentimental, superstitious, good-hearted
and brutal in the extreme.

In place of a single complex life story or family narrative, De
Bernières introduces and sets in motion a mob of characters
restricted, necessarily as in Dickens, to a single salient
characteristic. There is the beautiful Philothei, a Christian girl
betrothed since infancy to Ibrahim the Goatherd; two boys who play at
birds nicknamed Karatavuk (Blackbird) and Mehmetçik (Robin, or so
we’re told); Father Kristoforos with his religious doubts and
Abdulhamid Hodja with his beloved mare; the Greek schoolteacher who
stays up all night corresponding with irredentist secret societies;
the landlord Rustem Aga, his unfaithful wife and Circassian mistress
who is not who she seems; and Ibrahim the Potter, who has a talent
for such leaden aphorisms as “If the cat’s in a hurry, she has
peculiar kittens.”

As he tells their stories, De Bernières interleaves a biography of
Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern secular Turkey and known as Atatürk
or Father of the Turks. This old-fashioned piece of hero-worship
introduces a 19th-century solemnity which jars with the genre scenes
in Eskibahce, but does no real harm. Indeed, for those who don’t know
the modern history of the Middle East, the 22 biographical chapters
may be of some use.

As the old order begins to disintegrate, the Muslim boys of the town
are called up to do their religious duty and fight for the Sultan.
They are surprised to find they are fighting one set of infidels
(Australian Franks, British Franks, even French Franks) while allied
with another set of infidels (German Franks). Mehmetçik, who despite
his name is a Christian, is shipped off to a labour battalion. The
Armenians are told to collect their belongings and, in a scene kept
scrupulously free of hindsight, marched out of the town.

Karatavuk finds himself on the Gallipoli peninsula. In a terrific
literary set-piece, far beyond anything De Bernières has attempted or
achieved up to now, the boy fights his way through the Allied
invasion and defeat. The story winds its way through the
opportunistic Greek invasion of the Aegean coast, the Turkish defence
under Mustafa Kemal, the mass departure behind their icons of the
Christians from Eskibahce to mainland Greece, and the burning of the
Christian quarters of Smyrna.

For De Bernières, who sometimes cannot resist the 19th-century
manner, “history is nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from
hacked flesh in the name of great ideas”. His historical bugbears are
religious absolutism and “the devilish false idols of nationalism”.
Yet in the saintly village molla Abdulhamid Hodja or Karatavuk and
his comrades at Gallipoli, De Bernières the novelist shows that
religion and patriotism can also produce acts of heroism and
generosity. Those sections are a reminder that a book doesn’t have to
have complex characterisation to convey the less obvious truths of
life.

In his early novels, set in Latin America, De Bernières appeared to
be working off some debts to the magical-drippy school of Gabriel
García Márquez. There is an unfortunate scene here in which the
foul-mouthed corpse of a Greek merchant denounces the Greek and
Allied leaders as he sinks to the floor of Smyrna harbour. There is
also a Latin American copiousness that becomes more evident after
Karatavuk’s ordeal at Gallipoli. In the last third of the book, the
story loops away in distant meanders, like a river approaching the
sea. In those chapters, I learned some words of Turkish but many more
of English, such as immanitous, mommixity and phatic.

For those readers who liked the Italian officer in Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin, there’s an Italian officer here too. His name is Granitola.
He is part of the Italian army of occupation in southern Anatolia and
makes friends with Rustem Bey; he passes a few pages pleasantly
enough. A new character is introduced on page 607. If historical
novelists since Walter Scott have had difficulty starting – why begin
then? Why not a bit before? – De Bernières finds it agony to stop.
The reader closes the book with a satisfied thud only to hear the
yelping of two trapped epilogues and a crushed postscript.

But then, all critics say books are too long and all authors say they
are precisely the right length.

· James Buchan’s novels include Heart’s Journey in Winter. To order
Birds Without Wings for £15.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on
0870 836 0875.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress