The Sunday Telegraph (LONDON)
January 13, 2008 Sunday
FICTION: JEREMY SEAL PRAISES AN EPIC ACCOUNT OF THE END OF THE
ARMENIAN IDYLL
Jeremy Seal
Skylark Farm
BY ANTONIA ARSLAN
TR BY GEOFFREY BROCK
ATLANTIC, pounds 12.99, 276 pp
T pounds 11.99 ( pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4115
Ask what happened in Turkey during 1915 and most people will suggest
Gallipoli. An Armenian will answer differently, and with good cause.
It is estimated that one million Armenians, subject peoples of the
Ottoman Empire, were murdered that year across Anatolia. This novel
recounts that genocide, something the Turkish state continues to
deny, as it was experienced
by the extended family of one descendant, Italian-Armenian Antonia
Arslan.
The events that cost the lives of so many of Arslan’s relatives – the
massacre of the men and all but one of the boys at the farm which
provides the book’s title, and the survivors’ subsequent forced march
to Aleppo in Syria – took place some three decades before the
author’s birth. Even so, she would grow up with the memories of
surviving relatives such as Aunt Henriette, herself barely an infant
when she was soaked in ‘a jet of warm blood’ which had ‘squirted from
her father’s neck’ when he was decapitated at Skylark Farm.
Arslan does not flinch when it comes
to recording the horror of the genocide. She devotes the same care,
however, to evoking and exquisitely detailing the privileged place
the family had previously enjoyed in their rural Anatolian Arcadia.
Great Uncle Sempad is a trusting, prosperous chemist in the ‘little
city’ – never identified – awaiting the imminent visit from Italy of
his brother Yerwant, who will duly be Arslan’s grandfather. Sempad
prepares by ordering ‘a splendid set of croquet mallets’ from England
and by planning ‘a nice round gazebo for afternoon tea’. The Italians
enter the war against the Ottomans, however, forcing Yerwant to
cancel his visit just as the nationalist Young Turks make their move
against the Armenians.
So it is that picnics, tennis lawns and tureens give way, overnight,
to the murder and mutilation of the men. It is then the turn of the
women and children to endure rape and starvation as they embark on
the march out of Anatolia. Kurdish tribes descend from the hills to
fall upon the refugees. A ‘priest is stripped, his eyes dug out’, a
baby is ‘skewered on a bayonet’.
The women remain fixed upon achieving their one objective, which is
to deliver Henriette and her two siblings to Aleppo, that ark of the
Armenians.
Epic in sweep and heartbreaking in tone, Skylark Farm is billed as a
novel transformed from the ‘obscure memories’ that are Arslan’s
heritage. It reads rather as a dramatised family memoir, one that
remains in its essentials a factual evocation of the bestiality,
endurance and occasional heroism that attended the liquidation of
Anatolian Armenia.