From a breeze-block Istanbul

Ronald Wright
10 October 1997

THE NEW LIFE. Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Gueneli Gun. 296pp. Faber. - 0 571 17841 3

In A History of Reading (reviewed in the TLS, August 2, 1996), Alberto Manguel observes that reading links the reader's contemporary experience with many "an early page in a distant foreign century". He then quotes from Orhan Pamuk's novel The White Castle: "You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand . . . you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life." Such rereading of the past through the lens of the present - and vice versa - is the task Pamuk sets himself in The New Life, a sparkling allegorical novel of culture and consequence that has been a runaway bestseller in the author's homeland, Turkey.

An earnest young man of twenty-two - an Istanbul student who lives with his widowed mother - sees a strange book in the hands of a pretty girl in the university canteen. On his way home that evening, he spots the same book at a roadside stall. Falling swiftly to the powers of beauty and portent, this "rational student of engineering" buys it, reads it in a sitting, and "my whole life was changed." With the fervour of religious conversion, the man tells how the book affects him - saying little, until much later, about the book itself. We learn only that the volume bathes its reader in angelic light, that it promises "a new life", that it seems to have been written just for him, that it reveals "the meaning of my existence". For a long time, even its title stays a mystery (one I shall not disclose).

Pamuk fully exploits his coach-ride metaphor. The young man conflates love for the book with love for Janan, the girl in the canteen; and in search of the "new life", the pair begin a random pilgrimage of long-distance buses and greasy-spoon cafes. The trip remains chaste (frustratingly so for the narrator), because Janan loves another, a boyfriend who introduced her to the book, and who has disappeared after a Blow-Up-style shooting that may or may not be murder.

The time is vaguely the 1970s or 80s, and the travelling takes place mainly on the Anatolian steppe, with its wide skies and skinny poplars, cold nights and flaying sun, its dusty towns and Giacometti badlands. But the most vivid landscapes are interiors: a comic-book and film-noir world, where images of love and death play endlessly on video screens in stuffy buses, of "velvet nights", mawkish pop songs and horrible road accidents that act as tilts in the Cervantean quest. These crashes get a bit much, but that seems to be the point; they are a send-up of Hollywood's search for increasingly spectacular demolitions of life and property: in the land of plenty, "things must be smashed and broken". One is reminded of those potlatches in which chiefs displayed their wealth by setting fire to it in public.

Like a beguiling and complex work of music - a simile raised in the text - The New Life measures out its revelations carefully, and is better experienced than described. (I also suspect that the grace-notes have suffered in translation. Pamuk is known as a stylist, but the slangy AmerEnglish offered here does not suit the Turkish setting.) The enigmatic book within the book stirs up a flock of ghosts from "foreign centuries". Can it be the Bible? The Koran? The tales of Amadis? Alice in Wonderland? The Origin of Species? The Communist Manifesto?

The answer, when it comes, is deliciously bathetic, but by then Orwell's Room 101 has been invoked, as have the brave new worlds of Shakespeare and Huxley, Rilke's interest in time and essence, the Sufi mysticism of Ibn Ali, amid countless other allusions. The luminous book, it seems, is every book that ever changed a world. But, more than that, the act of writing itself is seen as bibliomantic - and not always to the good. Pamuk questions the price exacted from a culture when literacy fossilizes speech and, above all, the price paid when Turkey, under Atatuerk, changed alphabets in 1928.

The fault-line between the lost consolations of tradition and the evaporating promise of mod-ernity can be traced in every country, but there are few where it runs so close to the national surface as in Turkey. Having conquered the remnants of Byzantium, the Turkish elite allowed itself to be insidiously colonized by European attitudes, until it came to disparage its own civilization. After the First World War, the Kemalist republic used supposedly liberating foreign ideas to divorce the country from its past. National dress was banned, the capital moved, the religious establishment crippled, the mystic orders suppressed; and, greatest in symbolic power - signalling a fundamental shift in allegiance from sacred to secular, from Oriental past to Western future - the writing changed from Arabic to Roman script.

Pamuk's thoroughly modern protagonists, inhabiting a wintry breeze-block Istanbul, are the grandchildren of these reforms, yet their names have been chosen for deep historical resonances. The narrator, who goes unnamed for half the book, is Osman - both a Turkish Everyman (Osman and Ottoman are variants) and an echo of Osman, the Prophet Mohammed's son-in-law, who became caliph after a murder and was in turn assassinated. Mehmet, the young proselytizer who enthralls first Janan and then Osman with the mysterious book, recalls not only the Prophet himself (Mehmet= Mohammed), redactor of God's word, but Mehmet the conqueror of Constantinople (and perhaps, also the hero of Yashar Kemal's 1955 Memed, My Hawk, an influential novel of love and escape in Anatolia).

Throughout their grotesquely entwined adventures, the characters pass comment on what their country has done to itself in the twentieth century. Turkey, Osman says, has become a "land suffering from Amnesia", unable to read its own history. Even those who have prospered from progress - dealers in goods, for example, who seem to constitute parodic spiritual brotherhoods - feel that they have done so at the cost of their souls. "Everyone knows", says Mehmet's dotty father, "that the greatest enemy of the timetable for prayers is the timetable for trains." And from its Faustian bargain Turkey got only a defective copy of the Western dream; in the towns through which Osman passes, "concrete apartment buildings . . . besiege the statues of Atatuerk like prison walls."

The "new life" sought by Mehmet, Janan and Osman is not merely the alluring future that Turkey has swallowed but cannot digest; it is also, paradoxically, the encrypted memory of the past. Yet it would be a mistake to read this novel as a nativistic cri de coeur. Pamuk is too subtle a writer for that. He recognizes that cultures always borrow and steal; what matter are the choices and the means. Osman honours "this newfangled plaything called the novel" as "the greatest invention of the Western culture". Though it is "none of our culture's business," he is reading and writing it.

Pamuk is neither as surreal here as Borges nor as irksomely postmodern as Calvino, writers with whom he has been compared before. The playful seriousness of Umberto Eco is a better match. (A sinister organization seems bent on eliminating the book and its devotees; later, we learn that its operatives are code-named after watches: Seiko, Movado, and so forth.) Though the engaging plot has familiar ingredients, this is far from a conventional work of character. The personality explored is supra-personal: nothing less than the character of industrial civilization revealed in its procrustean shaping of mankind.

Orhan Pamuk has written that rare and difficult thing: a fiction of ideas. The New Life's unprecedented success in Turkey may have much to do with its witty and ingenious treatment of the country's unique transcultural ills. But Pamuk's achievement is also universal, bringing Western readers, in particular, to understand that the logic of kitsch, banality and greed threatens the civilization that purveys it as much as any other. We are all Young Turks seduced by Mammon, the ignoble victor to have emerged, at century's end, from the battlefield of ideologies.