Alone in Turkey

 
(Filed: 23/05/2004)

Tom Payne reviews Snow by Orhan Pamuk

In 2001, an extraordinary book called My Name Is Red appeared in English. It's impossible to recommend it without sounding eccentric - you try urging a friend to read a Turkish novel, brimming with stories within stories and Koranic dialectic, about murderous miniaturists working in the court of Sultan Murat III in 1591.

The novel is set around the 1,000th anniversary of Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina, when Islamic reformers were railing against artists in Istanbul. Its opening chapter is a monologue about a corpse, and the story takes in points of view from other perspectives: Satan says his piece, as does a horse, Death, a coin and the colour red.

Its translation brought its author, Orhan Pamuk, greater fame in the West, and, for all the book's violence, it could almost be read for entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything - jokes, horror, plot, structure, erudition, love.

In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?

The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women.

Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. "Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?" an Islamist asks Kars's director of education, before shooting him. "Does she want to become a film star?" The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives.

Throughout the book, Ka stops to write poetry (mostly taken from the dialogue around him). He asks a woman he loves, "Do you think it's beautiful?… What's beautiful about it?" As a writer, Ka is at odds with the intrigues and fear around him. He is often blissfully happy, and we learn that one poem's theme is "the poet's ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. But this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did. Such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!"

And yet the artists in the story are lethally relevant. When the coup comes, it comes on the stage of a theatre; even as members of the audience are being killed, people mistake the events for a fantastic illusion. For a while, Kars is run by an ageing actor who regrets that he's never played Atatürk. Even Ka, who is mistrusted for being too Western, becomes integral to the action.

At one point, Ka reflects on the writers he's known who have been lynched by Islamists, and it's a reminder that writing Snow has been an act of bravery, too. It's an unexpected sort of bravery, though, because Pamuk has made great efforts to enter the Islamists' heads. The effect is like meeting the possessed anarchists in Dostoevsky – these alternative views of the world find full expression, and make us question our own.

If Pamuk wrote about real situations and tried to find sympathy with true terrorists, more readers would be alarmed than already have been. But he tailors the terrorists to his requirements – the most seductive of them, Blue, hasn't killed anybody and dotes on puppies.

The author's high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age's crisis than any commentator could, and convince us of every character's intensity, making Snow a vital book in both senses of the word. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.