The New York Times
October 31, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
The Winds of War
By Amy Kroin
BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS
By Louis de Bernieres.
554 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
Louis de Bernieres’s overstuffed new novel is an absorbing epic about
the waning years of the Ottoman Empire — but you may need to develop
your own mental filing system to keep up with all its characters and
incident.
Set in the fictional town of Eskibahce on the coast of southwest
Anatolia (now in Turkey), ”Birds Without Wings” has 95 chapters —
not to mention a six-part epilogue — that give us the perspectives of
dozens of characters. There is no central protagonist to guide the
proceedings; you might care more about one character than another, but
only a couple are on view for any length of time.
A good deal of research has clearly gone into ”Birds Without Wings,”
which opens in 1900 and ends in the early 1920’s. The narrative’s
scattered approach will be familiar to readers of de Bernieres, a
self-proclaimed ”Marquez parasite” whose ouevre includes a panoramic
trilogy set in a fictional Andean village. De Bernieres reached a wider
audience with ”Corelli’s Mandolin” (1994), which was made into a
mildly corny movie starring Nicolas Cage. That novel was far more fluid
and accessible than this latest; while political concerns drove much of
the story, the relationship between Corelli and the daughter of a local
doctor gave the book an emotional core.
”Birds Without Wings” opens with a group of loosely connected
anecdotes; only gradually do they begin to pick up weight. But the
central figure here is Eskibahce itself — a town, we learn early on,
that will eventually be destroyed. De Bernieres rhapsodically evokes
the pastel-hued houses, the songbirds that warble in cages outside each
dwelling, the sunlight reflecting off the mosque’s golden dome.
Christians and Muslims live side by side in relative harmony. The wife
of the revered imam is chummy with a Christian woman; a beautiful
Christian girl is betrothed from childhood to an adoring Muslim
goatherd; a Christian boy teaches his Muslim friend to read and write.
This mingling of religions and ethnicities reflected the larger
tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. Of course, there were fault lines
within the empire, and Eskibahce has its own fissures: a suspected
adulteress is stoned in the town square; the local drunk incites a mob
to assault an Armenian resident; an otherwise loving father forces his
son to murder his pregnant (and unwed) sister. These barbaric acts
disrupt the town’s natural rhythms, but never to the breaking point.
Only when war intervenes does everything fall apart. The Balkan wars
are followed by World War I, and then by the devastating conflict
between Turkey and Greece, which led to the expulsion of Turkish
Christians to Greece and the parallel evacuation of Greek Muslims to
Turkey. This is all documented in close detail.
De Bernieres has always been adept at juxtaposing brutality with
episodes of high comedy or romance, and that’s certainly the case here.
But about midway through the book the scales tip toward the tragic and
never tip back. World War I divides the young men of Eskibahce; Muslims
are recruited to fight while their Christian counterparts are relegated
to labor battalions. The novel’s most illuminating section is a series
of letters a young soldier named Karatavuk writes about the agonizing
campaign at Gallipoli. De Bernieres evokes the particular intimacy of
this legendary battle, and he humanizes war without minimizing its
horror. Australian soldiers fling not just bombs but gifts into enemy
trenches, and the Turkish soldiers reciprocate in kind. On another
occasion the enemies acknowledge one another by name while retrieving
the dead from the battlefield.
Plunked right in the middle of the proceedings is an extended chunk of
quasi-reportage concerning Mustafa Kemal (later Mustafa Kemal Ataturk),
the founder of the republic of Turkey. Kemal appears sporadically in
the book’s earlier pages, and there the juxtaposition of his story with
that of his fictional counterparts creates a striking narrative
tension. When he’s given center stage, however, the novel’s momentum
flags — these sections have the feel of a laborious history lesson.
”Birds Without Wings” will not appeal to admirers of spare,
economical prose. De Bernieres favors ornate description. Sometimes the
excess verbiage weighs the novel down; just as often, it gives it the
pleasingly busy feel of a 19th-century classic (it’s no surprise that
de Bernieres has cited ”War and Peace” as a model for his work). And
though he’s given to making grand pronouncements about war and
nationalism, he always makes sure that the political is personal. In
the end, this is a book about mourning, about grief at the loss of a
community where Muslims and Christians were more than neighbors, where
the imam went out of his way to bless a Christian child and Christians
prayed to the Virgin Mary for their Muslim brothers.