By CAMILLA GIBB
Saturday, July 24, 2004 – Page D3
Birds Without Wings
By Louis de Bernières
Knopf Canada, 625 pages, $36.95
It’s been 10 years since Louis de Bernières’s much-loved Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was published, nine since it was honoured with the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and three since Hollywood stripped it of all its charm and fervour — the very things that made the book so glorious — and offered it up as a politically castrated piece of wooden sentimentality. Trust Hollywood to take Kobe beef — beer- and music-fed and massaged by loving hands — and grind it into meat loaf.
For this, Corelli’s author and architect cannot in any way be blamed (he neither wrote the screenplay nor cast its grossly miscast crew). “It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby’s ears being put on backwards,” is the extent of de Bernières’s public comment on the subject of film adaptation.
The movie, and sales of the book (on the order of 2.5 million), parachuted him into the international spotlight, from which he quickly averted his gaze. He bought a large Georgian rectory in Norfolk, where he indulges his hobby of restoring and puttering about the countryside in antique cars, has developed proficiency on several musical instruments, and enjoys the leisure of being able to write only if and when he feels like it.
There’s been much of the “most anticipated novel” promotional preamble that accompanies the subsequent work of any hugely successful author, along with a predictable tension nurtured by critics posing the question of whether his new work can possibly measure up. The fact is, de Bernières was already a highly successful author by the time the world caught up with him, having written, among other things, a much celebrated and wildly passionate trilogy before Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He is to be understood not as a one-hit wonder who arrived from nowhere one year and then disappeared, generating whispers of writer’s block for the next 10, but as a prolific and ambitious writer with a rather astonishing body of work, notable for its dense lyricism, fierce wisdom, soaring passion and remarkable wit. In this tradition, Birds Without Wings is pure de Bernières.
It may well be the case that Birds will have less mass-market appeal than its predecessor — any novel of more than 600 pages requires the attention and surrender of its reader, and the setting, Anatolia rather than Greece, in the First rather than Second World War, is less known and less familiar — but this is again a rich and passionate story of love and war, and in many ways a much more ambitious and important one.
Set in the small and out-of-the-way town of Eskibahce in southwestern Anatolia, de Bernières’s novel paints an idyllic portrait of an Ottoman town at the beginning of the 20th century. As in many other places in the empire, Muslims and Christians have lived here together for centuries, calling each other infidels in the same breath as they call each other best friends and betroth their sons and daughters to one another. Muslims pay homage to the image of the Virgin in the church; Christians are always to be found among the Muslims stoning to death some criminal of their faith in the public square; and the imam and the priest engage in debate throughout the night.
De Bernières may well “do character” better than any writer alive today: Even cats and horses and birds in his world are bestowed with full and endearing personalities. There are the children we come to know — the innocents who will grow up to be soldiers and war brides and exiles and madmen — and their parents, including an imam, a drunkard, a potter and a goatherd. Everyone has his place in this town, as well as a voice in this book, from an Armenian apothecary to a poor snow-bringer, an Orthodox priest, a resentful Greek schoolteacher fighting the futile fight against the barbarism of the Turkish tongue, a leech-gatherer, a couple of idle gendarmes, a bird-seller and, most powerful of all, in both economic terms and in terms of this narrative, a distinguished gentleman and wealthy landowner named Rustem Bey.
Rustem Bey might be singled out as the closest thing to a protagonist here. He’s a formal man, his emotional expression trapped by the demands of his station, and one whose wife has never loved him. When Rustem Bey discovers his wife with a lover, he promptly kills him, then escorts her to the public square where she is stoned to near-death by those who, in any other context, are called friends and neighbours. Later, and with much humiliation, he buys himself a mistress from a house of ill-repute in Istanbul. The love that develops between them is genuine and touching, though tainted both by Rustem Bey’s guilt about his wife, now resident and syphilitic in the local whorehouse, and his mistress’s secret that she is actually a Christian.
Stories of grand passions move the novel: conjugal, fraternal, interspecies. Many are delivered in an episodic, fragmentary and provocative manner, interspersing voices in first and third person to create a rich, mottled chorus, an amalgam of subplots that weave and complement each other in such a way that the town itself might be better called the central character. One principal thread runs like a taut current throughout: that documenting the evolution of Mustafa Kemal, who will one day be known as Ataturk, Turkey’s great liberator and modernizer, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey.
Long before Kemal’s vision can be realized, however, Balkan wars will be fought, during which the Russians will exterminate millions of Muslims and drive millions more as refugees into Ottoman lands, and a world war will occur, in which the Ottomans will naturally side with the Germans against the Russians, but in so doing will drive out the Armenians, who have lived among them for centuries. Ultimately, the Ottomans and their allies will lose, the war will end, and the empire will erupt in civil war now that the rhetoric of nationhood and self-determination has become an intractable part of the vernacular.
The town’s people are already torn apart both by the loss of their Muslim sons to the war effort, and the realization that their Armenian friends and neighbours have been driven out and massacred only several miles from home. But with Mustafa Kemal’s ascendance, a whole new world order is about to shape their destinies. Much to everyone’s amazement, then horror, half the town — the Christians who have lived here for centuries — are rounded up to be relocated to Greece, a country they have never known.
“When the committee came to value our property, none of us was very concerned. We didn’t think we would be deported, anyway, because we didn’t speak Greek,” says the beautiful and broken-hearted Philotei, whose lover Ibrahim, to whom she has been betrothed since childhood, has lost his mind to the effects of war.
“And we said, ‘We aren’t Greek, we are Ottomans,’ and the committee said, ‘There’s no such thing as Ottoman any more. If you’re a Muslim you’re a Turk. If you’re Christian and you’re not Armenian, and you’re from around here, you’re Greek.’ ”
This is the story of individual fates determined by the bigger political forces of a succession of wars, the combined effect of which set in motion the determination and shape of borders, the constitution of populations and the consequent civil wars and xenophobic campaigns waged throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East into the present day.
Where de Bernières is critical of all sides in equal measure, his stance on nationalism is unequivocal. It’s a “miserable stupidity”; combine nationalism with religion, and you’ve got “unholy spouses from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth.” To read de Bernières’s portrait of the town before it becomes a pawn in this bigger play is to feel the acute devastation wrought by agendas that lead to young men “shitting out” their entrails in trenches and women and children being forced from their homes, only to be robbed, raped and bludgeoned to death with rifle butts. A miserable stupidity, indeed.
For those who do not devour it immediately, Birds Without Wings will sit as great epics sit, on one’s shelf demanding to be read, making one feel irresponsible and guilty, provoking resolutions of “must read this before death.” Do read it before you die. It would be a terrible thing to have missed a work of such importance, beauty and compassion.
Camilla Gibb’s third novel, Sweetness in the Belly, largely set in revolutionary Ethiopia, is forthcoming in March, 2005.
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