MIAMI HERALD
Oct 3 2004
War’s human toll lamented
By Connie Ogle
‘ARMS AREN’T WINGS,” a woman in Louis de Bernieres’ violent,
heartbreaking yet resplendent new antiwar novel tells a small boy who
longs to fly. “If we had wings, do you think we would suffer so much
in one place? Don’t you think we would fly away to paradise?”
Oh, yes, we would fly. We would soar. We would escape the bloody
whims of history; the terrifying inevitability of change; the fear,
horror and death that bloom when powerful forces decide that
invisible borders — geographical, cultural, religious — count more
than people.
In the grand, sweeping style of his international blockbuster
“Corelli’s Mandolin,” de Bernieres masterfully explores the terrible
price of love, politics and war — a cost we still insist on paying.
“Birds Without Wings” is a breathtaking, sorrowful account of the
Ottoman Empire’s death, seen through the eyes of the Turks and
Greeks, Christians and Muslims of a tiny coastal town in southwest
Anatolia. Like “Corelli’s Mandolin,” which features the inhabitants
of the Greek island of Cephallonia during World War II, “Birds
Without Wings” traces another turbulent era’s devastating effects on
a simple place and its people. Fueled by rich storytelling and superb
historical detail, the novel is set in “the age when everyone wanted
an empire and felt entitled to one, days of innocence perhaps, before
the world realized, if it yet has, that empires were pointless and
expensive, and their subject peoples rancorous and ungrateful.”
Turkey bridges the gap between East and West, its largely Islamic
population governed by a secular democratic government, and so the
novel feels disturbingly pertinent. But de Bernieres never fails to
keep his characters in sharp focus as he offers us an impassioned
argument against aggression and blind nationalism, lamenting its cost
with a fervor disturbingly relevant to our current war-heightened
sensibilities.
He is also a magnificent storyteller, bringing to life humble
Eskibahce and its rustic inhabitants, among them Ali the
Broken-Nosed, not to be confused with Ali the Snow-bringer; Mehmetcik
and Karatavuk, best friends who mimic birds as boys and grow up to
fight different battles; the homeless Dog, whose ravaged visage
frightens everyone; the lonely Rustem Bey, the town’s wealthy
landlord; and Ibrahim and Philothei, Muslim and Christian, betrothed
since childhood but doomed to tragedy.
Religion rarely polarizes. “Life was merrier when the Christians were
still among us, not least because almost every one of their days was
the feast of some saint,” Iskander the Potter, one of our narrators,
confides. The town’s imam and priest respectfully greet each other as
“Infidel Efendi.” Brides adopt their husbands’ faith without
argument. Muslims stand at the back of the church during Christian
services; Christian feet tread the clay that shapes Muslim pots. All
this will change with the rise of Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern
Turkey, whose story de Bernieres also tells in short, succinct
chapters that grow more complex as the soldier’s dreams expand.
De Bernieres, like Kemal, is a harsh critic of religious monomania.
“It is curious that the Russians, calling themselves Christians, and
like so many other nominal Christians throughout history, took no
notice whatsoever of the key parable of Jesus Christ himself, which
taught that you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and that even
those you have despised and hated are your neighbors. This has never
made any difference to Christians, since the primary epiphenomena of
any religion’s foundation are the production and flourishment of
hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy.” He is scornful of Islamic
extremists as well, decrying the “mad light of moral certainty in the
eyes of those who acted on God’s commands as laid down in holy books
that no one was able to read.”
War, quite simply, appalls de Bernieres. His lengthy, unnerving
descriptions of the battle of Gallipoli — the book is dedicated
partly to his grandfather, who was severely wounded there — detail
atrocities with brutal, numbing repetition. “There had been fighting
for one month, and the dead had never been collected,” Iskander’s son
Karatavuk tells us. “Some bodies were swollen up, and some were
black, and they were seething with maggots, and others were turning
to green slime, and others were fully rotted and shriveling up so
that the bones stuck out through the skin. A lot of them were built
into the parapets and fortifications, so that you might say they were
being employed as sandbags.”
“Birds Without Wings” is not without moments of humor, but atrocity
haunts it — children crucified and disemboweled by the Greeks, the
Turkish slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna. “I blame men of God of both
faiths,” Iskander says. “I blame all those who gave their soldiers
permission to behave like wolves.”
In the face of horror, de Bernieres can offer only the meager comfort
of man’s ability to endure and adapt. But he has given us a marvelous
novel nonetheless. Its insight into the darkest human desires is
unerring and indelible. Oh, how we long for paradise. Oh, how we long
to fly.