Sickness and health

Orhan Pamuk’s flawed but entertaining novel explores nationalism on a fictional island near Crete hit by plague

Orhan Pamuk likes to play new games. Every one of his books differs markedly from the others, yet each shares a capacity for disconcerting the reader. This one is long and intellectually capacious. It tackles big subjects: nationalism and the way nations are imagined into being; ethnic and religious conflict; the decline of an empire; the political repercussions of a pandemic. It includes many deaths. Yet, for all the weight of its subject matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, even flippant. It has many flaws. It is repetitive; it contains far too much exposition. All the same – in terms of content – it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year.

In 1901, a man in a major’s uniform steps on to the balcony of a government building and brandishes a flag. Blood is spurting from a bullet wound in his arm but, undaunted, he cries out

to the crowd assembled beneath him: “From this moment on, our land is free. Long live the Mingherian nation, long live liberty!”

Fifty-eight years later, a little girl repeats those words to her great-grandmother. The child has learned in school about her nation’s birth. What young Mina has been taught, though, deviates from what we readers know. She thinks there were thousands of people assembled beneath the balcony. We know there were a measly few – most of the major’s intended audience having been deterred by terror of catching bubonic plague.

Mingheria is a fictional island, lying somewhere between Crete and Cyprus and sharing aspects of both islands’ history. It is part of the ailing Ottoman empire. The population is divided roughly equally between Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians. The governor is the easy-going Sami Pasha,

whose career as a colonial official has been disappointing and of whom readers are likely, despite his occasional cruelty, to become rather fond.

The novel we are reading, so we are informed in a preface, is written by Mina in 2017, with a chronology that is as far from straightforward as its narrative strategy. There are premonitions and spoilers. Characters’ back stories are introduced late, sometimes at disproportionate length. It is confusing, I think deliberately so.

Pamuk has often written indirectly about Turkey’s nationalist revolution, and got into trouble for doing so. This book can be read as a playful variation on the theme. More obviously it is a novel about a community ravaged by an incurable disease. Yet, for all its rows of corpses, it seldom sounds a tragic note. Rather, it is a compendium of literary experiments, ludic, audacious, exasperating and entertaining. LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT IS AN AUTHOR AND BIOGRAPHER