Flights of imagination for an unforgettable vacation
Jul 15th 2004
>From The Economist print edition
This week we devote the whole of the section to reviews of novels that
could make great travelling companions
JUST over 40 years ago, Greek and Turkish book-lovers alike burst into
tears as they read a new Greek novel: in `Farewell Anatolia’, Dido
Sotiriou drew on her childhood memories to describe the comradeship of
two shepherd boys, one Christian, the other Muslim, who go on to fight
on opposite sides of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22. On the final
page, the Christian narrator mourns his native soil and his long-lost
friend-and curses the powers that divided them.
Until now, the human story of Ottoman society’s violent break-up,
under the pressures of war and nationalism, has largely been kept
within the Greek-Turkish family: not many people outside the region
know it, and even there it must be told elliptically because it flies
in the face of nationalist orthodoxies. Now a version of this story
will reach a wider audience: it is the theme ofa new novel-his first
for a decade-by Louis de Bernières, the British author who captivated
readers with `Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’, a tale of love and war in
Greece.
`Birds Without Wings’ is not just about one friendship, although the
camaraderie of two boys later divided by war is one central theme. The
bookdepicts a whole tapestry of relationships in a close-knit but
brutish community in the twilight of Ottoman Anatolia, where Muslims
pray in Arabic and Christians in Greek, but the only language anyone
understands is Turkish. There is a gangof Christian and Muslim
children who play together and dream of marrying. Even more
impressively, the Muslim hodja’s wife and the Christian priest’s wife
are best friends, and their husbands get along well too.
But as the war clouds gather and finally burst, the Muslim boys are
taken off to hell-holes like Gallipoli, the Armenians are marched away
to exile or death, and the Greek Orthodox are press-ganged into
forced-labour units. After the war, the surviving Orthodox Christians
are shipped off to Greece, an alien world.
As a (broadly successful) storytelling technique, Mr de Bernières
presents a series of first-person accounts by village characters, in a
quirky, uneven style: sometimes naive and homely; sometimes
over-elaborate. The net effectis to give the impression of a text
translated from another language. Also interwoven, for historical
context, is a biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the
mono-ethnic Turkish republic which replaced the multi-ethnic Ottoman
world.
Given that his book is presented as a sort of history lesson, Mr de
Bernières will be challenged on his facts. How will he fare? His
account of a Turcophone world, where barriers between the monotheisms
had blurred, is not entirely implausible-even though the areas where
this situation existed wereabout 400 miles to the east of this book’s
notional setting. The author was inspired by the deserted ruins of a
once prosperous coastal town known as Kaya in Turkish and Livisi in
Greek. This is certainly a haunting, and perhaps indeed a haunted
place; but virtually all its people spoke Greek and knew they were not
Turks or Muslims.
Still, such quibbling should not spoil the pleasure of those who come
looking for an absorbing read about a remote but captivating time. The
Ottoman world’s break-up is a rich, poignant story, and Mr de
Bernières is a good storyteller. At times he is nearly as good as
Dido Sotiriou.