Nicholas Lezard on a vertiginous Turkish bestseller

Sting in the tale

The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk 296pp, Faber

About a year ago, I was having lunch with the man luckless enough to be my editor at Faber. I'll have to cut this short," he said. "Orhan Pamuk's coming to the offices." "Who?" I spluttered. An esteemed Turkish author, I was told, who was having his latest novel published here. "You should read it," said the editer"it's very good." "Yeah, right," I grunted, making a mental note to" avoid forever the works of the man who had cut short my chance to avail myself of Faber & Faber's legendary hospitality (two bottles of beer and a bowl of Thai noodles).

So, who [is] Orhan Pamuk? Well, imagine a modernist, brain-churning writer, the kind who gets compared to Proust, Borges, Calvino, Ballard, Hesse and Faulkner. Now imagine that this writer operates in a country culturally torn between East and West, where stepping over-enthusiasticalry into either position can get you into deep trouble; and now imagine that the latest novel by such a writer — a deep, allusive, difficult, richly textured novel — sells 200,000 copies in his native country; becoming, in fact, the fastest-selling novel in that country's history. No wonder I was all but left with the bill by my departing editor.

For the first 80-odd pages of The New Life I found this last fact — Pamuk's saleability — the most staggering. What kind of reading public hands such success to such a book? For I was finding it heavy going. Are the readers inordinately sophisticated, far better than decadent Westerners at picking up nuance and meaning? Or are they so starved of prose that they would achieve similar relief from the copy on cereal packets?

The truth is much nearer the first proposition than the second. But the book does allude to a kind of collective prose-hunger. It begins with the narrator reading a book which transforms his life to the point where he becomes obsessed: he abandons his studies in order to find others who have been changed utterly by the book, travelling around Turkey on its network of lethally dangerous buses, surviving by lifting the wallets and identities of dead fellow-passengers, all the time looking for something, and addressing his remarks to an Angel.

This is not my cup of raki at all, I thought; a strong whiff of magic realism, and all this about a book that changes lives seemed to be making claims that this one, at least, cannot fulfil. But suddenly, around page 80, everything started to set. Correspondences within the book became clearer, as if it was haunting itself; a sly, anarchic sense of humour became discernible; and it looked as though it was also filleting Turkey like a kipper. It is a satire on a demi-police state, a country unsure whether to be secular or religious; and on anywhere else you like where history and commercialism are at war. "A good book is something that reminds us of the whole world," says a character. The New Life is not parochial.

You could become obsessive about this book: at times you wonder whether the book that spooks the narrator is in fact this one — giving The New Life a dizzying, vertiginous feel, at once as real as a phone directory and as insubstantial as a bubble. Sometimes it seemed like Borges crossed with The Usual Suspects, but without the tricksiness, reminding me of Walter Benjamin's comment that "all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one — that they are, in other words, special cases". This is a special case.