The insight of an outsider
By Simon Bahceli
Cyprus Mail
15 Feb 09
I DO not believe there is a book that more needs to be read by every
Cypriot alive than Birds Without Wings. The funny thing is, it is not
about Cyprus, and neither was it written by a Cypriot.
It was written by the renowned British writer Louis De Bernières, and
set in a place barely 100 miles from the northern shores of Cyprus in
southwestern Anatolia, where up until less than a century ago Greeks,
Turks, Armenians and an assortment of other ethnic groups lived in
relatively happy coexistence. Maybe they bickered sometimes; maybe
intermarriage was not always smiled upon, but they rubbed along just
fine, speaking each other’s languages, and sharing superstitions, food
and music.
When nationalism and war reared its ugly head, the good neighbourliness
they had enjoyed for hundreds of years became nothing but a fond
memory, and in return Greeks and Turks gained the relative blandness of
separate and racially homogenous nation states.
Bernières was in Cyprus last week to promote his latest novel, The
Partisan’s Daughter, and found time to talk with the Sunday Mail about
his new book, what inspires him to write about peoples in places as far
apart as Colombia and Cefalonia, and also to ponder a little on what
chance Cypriots have of turning back the clock to rediscover
coexistence.
For someone who writes such exciting and exotic stories, Bernières is a
surprisingly ordinary-looking, slightly rotund man in his mid fifties.
He dresses with all the flamboyance of a part-time economics lecturer,
and speaks plainly and softly in an almost-posh southern English
accent.
I begin by asking him how he manages to so accurately capture the Greek
and Turkish characteristics of those in Birds Without Wings without
having spent a great chunk of his life living there.
`People often ask me questions like this, and I don’t really know the
answer. It’s a sort of illusion that I’m quite good at pulling off. I
do know Greeks and I do know Turks, although there are so many
similarities, there are also differences. Turks tend to be more
reserved. They take longer to get to know. Greeks become friendly much
quicker, and seem to be more high-spirited. You can’t have a really
good laugh with a Turk until you’ve known him for a couple of months,’
he says.
I ask if he believes Turks and Greeks will ever be able to put the past
enmities behind them and normalise relations in the way, say, the
British and Germans have done.
`No, not really because they’ve both got such long memories for these
old atrocities. You would need a sudden plague of amnesia. If that
happened, everything would be fine.’ He adds that in Europe animosity
over the world wars has been overcome largely because `we have lost our
religious fanaticism, and are progressively losing our nationalism’.
Bernières observes, however, that when Greek and Turks finally get to
meet, they tend to have a good time. He cites Turkish and Greek
musicians Zulfu Livaneli and Nikis Theodorakis who founded the
Turkish-Greek friendship society as an example of the rapport that can
develop.
`I see them as complimentary. It’s obvious that people like them take
tremendous pleasure in each other’s talents and in each other’s
company. And this is a pleasure denied to people unnecessarily.’
I ask whether the same can be said for Cyprus, and whether he believes
that without the influence of Turkish and Greek nationalism, people
might just go back to the old ways of good neighbourliness, as
portrayed in his book.
`There are specific problems in Cyprus, which are to do with property,
which you didn’t have in Northern Ireland, or in any way between
England and France, or between England and Germany. There’s no talk now
of compensation, or trying to get your old land back. But there is in
Cyprus. Everybody wants the family home back.’
The Partisan’s Daughter is a relatively short story when compared with
Birds Without Wings and its even more well-known predecessor Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin. It is a story that focuses on just two main
characters – one a rather drab, middle-aged Englishman, the other an
exotic Serbian woman. Over a period of several months the two
characters meet almost daily for coffee, during which the Serb relates
to the Englishman rambling stories of her life that leave the man both
gripped and besotted.
Bernières tells me that although his latest book is very different from
the kind of novel that has made him famous, it is in no way a departure
from his earlier Toystoy-esque style.
`I’ve been writing these stories for nearly 20 years¦actually it’s the
first novel I ever wrote, but it’s been through seven drafts and all
these years since,’ he explains.
I sense Bernières gets slightly annoyed when I ask why he has made
Chris, his main character in The Partisan’s Daughter, out to be quite
so nerdy.
`I didn’t think of him as a nerd; I thought of him a somebody who
didn’t have the courage or the energy to live life as it should be
lived. Somebody without a grip on life, where he was just about ready
to take a chance, but messed it up. He’s the poor bastard in a bad
relationship, isn’t he? It’s happened to all of us.’
I am not sure whether to agree, but I nod anyway as Bernières explains
Chris’ psyche and the reasons why I might have received the impression
that he was a nerd.
For Chris, he says, being forty in the mid-to-late seventies meant he
was born a little too early to benefit from the `sixties and seventies
revolution’, the result being that he missed out on the chance `to be
younger for longer’.
`It wasn’t possible before. You turned into your parents quite young
before that. It’s about the time. He’s seeing all these young people
having fun and doing all these things he doesn’t even like much. But he
feel envious and left out. I suppose that is part of a mid-life crisis.’
Bernières qualifies this view with his own experience on the matter,
and how his take is essentially different from Chris’.
`When I look at young people going to raves or clubbing or listening to
hip-hop I just think, thank God I’m not doing that. It started with me
when punk came in. Before that I was quite into progressive rock, you
know, with 20-minute guitar solos. Horrendously pompous rubbish
actually, but I was quite into it. When punk came in, they were all a
couple of years younger than me, and I thought I’m out of it, it’s
nothing to do with me. I just though it was vulgar and stupid.’
He adds: `In that way, punk did me a big favour, because it got me into
classical music, and traditional music, and music from all over the
world. But Chris feels the other way. He feels marginalized.’
`But what about Chris’ car? A brown Austin Allegro is not exactly the
epitome of cool, is it?’ I insist, convinced still of Chris’ nerdiness.
`No, it never was. My father had two of them. They both had to be jump
started from my Morris Minor on the first day we had them, they were
that bad. Terrible car, but he liked them.’
From Chris we turn to Rosa, the female lead character in The Partisan’s
Daughter, and I ask whether he finds it harder to create well-rounded
women characters than male ones.
`No, I grew up in a matriarchy. My father was at work and often got
back after I had gone to bed, so I spent most of my time with a mother
and two sisters. And so I feel I have quite an insight into living
amongst women,’ he says.
`But don’t you think you might idealise them a little bit?’ I ask,
thinking of Rosa, Pelagia (from Captain Coreli’s Mandolin), Philothei
(from Birds Without Wings) and Annika (from Senior Vivo and the Coca
Lord), all leading female characters from his stories, and all
adorable, both in terms of personality and appearance.
`I made that mistake when I was very young. I did it because both of my
sisters were very pretty, and so I expected all pretty girls to be as
nice as my sisters. And that was very disillusioning, as you can
imagine.’
I ask Bernières if he can name a nasty female character from among his
books. He cannot.
That does not mean, however, that bad things do not happen to his
female characters. In fact, really awful things happen to them quite
often. Rosa, for one, is gang-raped and tortured, and so is Annika. The
unimaginably beautiful Philotei too comes to a sticky end.
3But Bernières insists he neither has it in for women, nor for his
readers, describing Annika’s sufferings in particular as `a moral use
of violence’.
`
There’s a tradition of torturing people to death in Colombia which got
going in the 1950s during the period of La Violencia. Half a million
people died¦liberal versus conservatives. Communists weren’t even
involved. They sent out marauding bands into each other’s areas to
conduct these campaigns of torture and mayhem, and when the cocaine
trade kicked in, they took over these methods of violence. And what I
wanted Westerners to understand was the moral consequences of what they
do when they stick white powders up their noses.’
Bernières reassures me he is not interested in violence per se, and
would hate to think of anyone gaining pleasure from his literary
destruction of women. He adds that the book he hopes to release next
Autumn contains `no violence whatsoever’.
His forthcoming book, he says, `is a sort of nostalgia fiction about
life in an English village in the seventies. They’re fictions but
they’re based in the sort of village where I grew up in the late
sixties and seventies. Looking back I realise that almost everyone
there was mad.
`I thought it was normal back then. I only recently realised how exotic
England is,’ he adds.
Bernières says he also has `at least one more epic’ in the vein of
Captain Corelli and Birds Without Wings to write. The new one will `go
almost all over the world’ and is loosely based on the life of his
grandfather, who, he says, `wandered like Ulysses¦because his wife
would never divorce him, so he could never start again’.
It sounds fascinating, but Bernières concedes he is yet to come up with
a plot for the story. Undoubtedly he will, but be sure not to expect a
happy ending, because Bernières does not like them.
`I always think, ever since I lost my religious faith, that in real
life the only real ending is death.’