Up against a wall of double talk

The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

Jonathan Coe

The slippery, equivocal texture of Orhan Pamuk's second novel — written between 1985 and 1989 — is a reflection both of its literary aesthetic and of the modern Istanbul where the story is set. This is a world in which "everything imitated everything else — where all the stories and the people were simultaneously themselves and their own imitations, and where all stories alluded to other stories". It would be possible, then, to describe the book in terms of plot (lawyer's wife disappears leaving a curt note, he spends the next week searching for her), or theme (national and personal identity, loss of self, nostalgia, storytelling). But given its own obsession with narrative allusions, an equally direct avenue of approach is through the numerous other recent novels to which it bears a resemblance.

Comparisons with Eco's monumental Foucault's Pendulum are inevitable: both books immerse the reader in mad political conspiracy theories, labyrinthine accounts of underground sects and buried histories, in order to bring theories of modern linguistics (like the disjunction between signifier and signified) to narrative life. Its concern with a reluctant investigator gradually shedding his own identity calls to mind Paul Auster's New York Trilogy; its highly intellectualised preoccupation with face and gesture as the expression of character suggests Kundera's Immortality. The plot device of a decent, bewildered man deserted without explanation by his wife, triggering a search which itself becomes an exercise in self-examination, was used recently by Tim Winton in The Riders. Pamuk's novel shares with Milorad Pavic's Landscape Painted With Tea a structural and thematic fascination with anagrams, word-puzzles and acrostics. But most of all, it resembles Francisco Goldman's The Long Night Of White Chickens — a similarly long, complex, metaphysical thriller, also with a journalistic background, in which the hero sets off in futile pursuit of a vanished woman and comes up against an impenetrable wall of double-talk and political corruption.

In part, these comparisons simply point up an interesting overlap between a whole sequence of novels published during the last 10 years, all from very different cultures; but also, paradoxically, they alert us to what is most original in Pamuk's work. For none of them have quite the note of sly, generous, rueful humanity which makes The Black Book so consistently engaging across its span of 400 otherwise demanding pages.

How much of this is an intrinsically Turkish quality, and how much a product of Pamuk's own distinctive authorial voice, is difficult to say. Certainly we get a strong sense of the city as Pamuk's appealing young hero, Galip, plods randomly through the snowswept, nocturnal streets of Istanbul, searching for his wife Ruya and — more assiduously — her half-brother Jelal, one of the country's most famous political columnists. His writing is full of sympathy for families crammed into monolithic, impersonal apartment buildings, commuters let down by non-existent buses, dreamers gawping at Westernised images of perfection in Sunday afternoon movie theatres. And he's good on the small comedies of family life, awkward domestic suppers, ageing aunts and uncles caught up in the rituals of a lifetime (like Uncle Melih who insists on rereading the newspapers in different rooms, "as if the same news might conceivably be interpreted differently downstairs than it was upstairs").

All of this adds a profound social and human dimension to a novel which might otherwise run the risk of confining itself too rigorously to the world of ideas. The structure is rigid and schematic, with chapters describing Galip's search alternating with examples of Jelal's learned, wide-ranging columns. These columns form the scholarly backbone of the book, and gradually cohere into a massive disquisition on folklore, Islam and recent Turkish political history, so that a parallel emerges between Galip's personality crisis and the struggle of an entire culture to maintain a sense of identity in the face of seductive Western overtures.

Whodunnit fans seeking tidy solutions should take heed of an early sentence in which Galip suggests that "the only detective novel worth reading would be one in which the writer himself didn't know the identity of the murderer". The whole temperament of the novel is resistant to closure, but the final pages do have the affecting stamp of emotional rightness. "Istanbul is a grand place, an incomprehensible place," Galip concludes. Pamuk's novel, which raises far more questions than it answers, mirrors these qualities and makes of them something at once both complete and unsettling.