VILE AND VALOROUS IN 1880S TURKEY

Suburban Edition
March 8, 2010 Monday

Review by Maureen Corrigan

THE WINTER THIEF
By Jenny White
Norton. 400 pp. $24.95

Jenny White’s new historical suspense novel, "The Winter Thief," is
set mostly in Istanbul in 1888, but throughout my reading of it I kept
thinking of Ken Loach’s award-winning 1995 film, "Land and Freedom."

Loach’s look at the Spanish Civil War focuses on an idealistic young
Brit who joins the International Brigades to fight the fascists. I
remember seeing the film with a friend who was uncharacteristically
silent afterward. Eventually, he shook off his mood to say one thing
in response to the story: "I would have been killed." My companion
wasn’t being self-aggrandizing; in fact, he was probably right.

Loach’s movie brought home the fact that our lives are pawns to our
convictions as they intersect with the whims of the historical moment.

That, too, is the message of White’s ambitious novel, which is more
interested in exploring the unforeseen consequences of political and
personal loyalties than it is in fully cranking up the machinery of
the standard thriller.

The novel opens on a scene of passionate naivete that, of course,
comes to no good end. Vera Arti is a new bride who has defied her
wealthy Armenian family and secretly married a communist organizer
named Gabriel. On a snowy Christmas Day in Istanbul, Vera makes her
way to the office of an Armenian publisher. In her hands is a copy
of "The Communist Manifesto," which she implores the publisher to
print so that "the Armenian people will find the strength to resist
oppression . . . by joining the International Movement, by standing
shoulder to shoulder with other oppressed peoples around the world."

Vera has only an elementary understanding of the rhetoric she’s
spouting. She gravitated toward communism out of compassion for the
suffering masses and because of her love for Gabriel. The newlyweds
are merely stopping in Istanbul before they journey to a utopian
commune called New Concord, situated in an abandoned monastery in
the mountains, where some of their comrades have already settled.

Unbeknown to Vera, Gabriel has arranged for a contraband cargo of
guns to be shipped to the commune. And, oh yes, he also has robbed
the Imperial Ottoman Bank of a sultan’s ransom in gold and jewels in
order to keep the commune afloat. When Vera is nabbed by the secret
police after her foolish excursion to the publisher, Gabriel has
to decide whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of his
hapless young wife.

Enter Kamil Pasha, the hero of this story, as well as of White’s
two earlier suspense novels set in 19th-century Turkey. Kamil is a
special prosecutor in the secular courts. A moody loner attracted to
modern culture, he is drawn into the search for Vera, which puts him
at odds with a fiend named Vahid, the head of a rogue branch of the
secret police. For vile reasons of his own, Vahid has convinced the
sultan that the New Concord commune is allied with a secessionist
movement and must be wiped out — along with the neighboring villages.

Realizing that a massacre of innocents is in the making, Kamil charges
off with a small contingent of soldiers to do battle with Vahid and
his forces.

That’s just a skimming summary of the busy plot of "The Winter Thief."

White, a professor of anthropology who specializes in Turkey, adroitly
tosses in period detail as well as romance, political intrigue and
brutal battle scenes. But "The Winter Thief" really distinguishes
itself by the intelligence of its smaller moments, when characters
take stock of their limitations against the larger demands of history.

During the siege at the monastery, for instance, a
philosopher-turned-commune-dweller ruefully reflects on how
ill-prepared to fight he is. "I’m a philosopher," he tells an
admiring young woman. "We collect the cream clotted at the rim of
every civilization. We don’t need to see it milked and churned." By
the end of the novel, Kamil’s own modernist self-doubts about
his actions in the aftermath of battle become close to crippling:
"He had chosen life over honesty, one kind of justice over another,
but he knew not everyone would agree that he had chosen well."

Out of the purest of motives — a desire for social equality,
a yearning for personal happiness, a wish to share a book with a
larger audience — disaster can ensue. That vivid opening image of
the ingenuous Vera clasping her incendiary book stays with a reader
long after the shooting stops and an uneasy peace has been restored.

Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches
a course on detective fiction at Georgetown University.