Christian Science Monitor
Aug 23 2004
A shattered peace between Muslims and Christians
De Bernières returns 10 years after ‘Corelli’s Mandolin’
By Ron Charles
That rumbling sound just over the horizon is a stampede of giant
novels set to arrive in a cloud of publicity. Pity the midlist author
who pushes a new book into the path of this horde next month. To the
extent Hollywood rises or falls on Thanksgiving weekend, publishers
are concentrating more and more of their big literary novels in the
fall, a self-destructive tendency sure to overwhelm the nation’s
shrinking body of readers (and newspaper book sections). If, as
Calvin Trillin observed, the average shelf life of a book is
somewhere between milk and yogurt, we’re about to see some major
spoilage.
That would be a shame because from the first novel to arrive this
looks like a particularly good season. “Birds Without Wings,” by
Louis de Bernières, is a deeply rewarding work about the dissolution
of the Ottoman Empire. It’s both exotically remote and tragically
relevant in our age of confident nation-building.
As he did in his bestselling “Corelli’s Mandolin” (1994), de
Bernières roots his examination of the byzantine complexity of
history in the life of a small town. For generations, Christians and
Muslims have lived harmoniously in Eskibahçe, a fictional coastal
village carved into a hillside in what we now call Turkey. The novel
opens in 1900, on the eve of political and social calamities that no
one could possibly imagine, least of all these simple folk, whose
lives have more in common with 1500 than 1950.
One by one, they tell their stories – short, simple scenes that
gradually cut new facets in the hard substance of world history.
“With us there has been so much blood,” Iskander the Potter says in
the first paragraph, but it’s easy to ignore that warning as he and
his neighbors describe the everyday joys and trials of their lives as
though these were the riffs of some Ottoman Garrison Keillor.
There’s young Philothei, a Christian girl so beautiful she must wear
a veil to quell quarrels in the town. And Ibrahim, her betrothed, who
can “mimic the stupid comments of a goat in all its various states of
mind.” Karatavuk and Mehmetçik play among the hills, endlessly
blowing their bird whistles and flapping their arms. The proud
Christian priest accepts “offerings from Muslims who were anxious to
hedge their bets with God by backing both camels.” Ali the
Snowbringer lives with his asthmatic donkey in the trunk of a tree.
And Levon, the Armenian pharmacist, graciously helps the Muslim drunk
who once assaulted him in the street.
These are often charming, even comic stories, but they’re quickly
forced to contend with stunning scenes of violence. “It is one of the
greatest curses of religion,” de Bernières writes, “that it takes
only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt
to turn neighbors who have loved each other into bitter enemies.”
That twist turns fathers against daughters and husbands against
wives, slicing through ligaments of affection in one haunting chapter
after another. With his presentation of this ecumenical community, de
Bernières suggests that these eruptions of domestic violence – tragic
as they are, motivated by pride and religious absolutism – can be
controlled and minimized by the essential goodwill of reasonable
people who know one another well.
But “Birds Without Wings” maintains a bifocal vision. One eye stays
focused on the village, while the other sees nations foolishly
slipping toward World War I. Among the scenes of life in little
Eskibahçe, de Bernières interjects blood-soaked snapshots of the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the chaotic ascension of
Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey. With wry disgust, he
races through revolutions and counterrevolutions, massacres and
deportations, the craven interference of European powers and their
disastrous passivity, atrocities reflected endlessly in the mirror of
revenge.
It’s often difficult to follow the swift crosscurrents of this
complex period, but de Bernières’s thesis is strikingly clear:
“History,” he writes, “is finally nothing but a sorry edifice
constructed from hacked flesh in the name of great ideas.”
Eventually, of course, obscurity can protect Eskibahçe no longer. The
rabid demands of fanatics who know nothing of this delicate town rain
down upon it, fertilizing sectarian strife that these people had
managed to hold in check for centuries. Again and again, we see the
way reckless acts by vain leaders function as the flutterings of that
proverbial butterfly that incites a hurricane far away. Friend is set
against friend, neighbor against neighbor, always against their true
will. With his unfailingly wise perspective, de Bernières notes, “The
triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism
effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a
race.”
Karatavuk, one of the Muslim boys who played so happily with his
Christian friend, takes us into the smoke of trench warfare with all
its ghastly farce and startling moments of compassion. His burning
faith in the jihad is slowly smothered by the senseless horrors he
witnesses and commits. “It is only people like me,” he writes, “who
wonder why God does not do just one good miracle, and make the world
perfect in an instant.”
So much is remarkable about this novel, from the heft of its history
to the power of its legends. In this great bazaar of family life and
international politics, the bittersweet metaphor of “birds without
wings” grows deeper and richer. The people of Eskibahçe are blessed
with soaring aspirations, but like all of us they must live firmly on
the ground, forced to cope with one another and the earthquakes of
history. This epic about the tragedy of borders is likely to cross
all borders, moving readers everywhere as it describes the harrowing
cost of remaking faraway places in the image of our dreams.
– Ron Charles is the Monitor’s book editor. Send e-mail comments
about the book section to Ron Charles.