This mega novel by Orhan Pamuk is a triumph of confusion, ramblings and boredom. It is historical fiction, set almost entirely on a hypothetical Mediterranean island during the 1901 plague as the Ottoman Empire is disintegrating. The machinations of managing the outbreak on the island eventually prompts the islanders to declare independence. The great great granddaughter of the island’s first queen is the novel’s narrator.
Living in the current time she tries to piece together the contradictory pieces of written history of the island by studying the letters of the Princess who was there during the plague, her great great grandmother. She also studies the paintings of the events of the island, the reports from various libraries and newspapers. She writes in the preface, “This is both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel.” And so, the readers’ disorientation begins at the beginning.
THE NIGHTS OF PLAGUE just doesn’t stack up to the pleasures of reading other gargantuan books- Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. The 750-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is even loved by teenagers. You can get through these whoppers because they hold your attention. THE NIGHTS OF PLAGUE doesn’t. It jumps all over with the many connections lost in a jumble.
The history sections would be interesting if they were cohesive. “The collapse of the Empire was hastened by the Italians, who, having made a deal with the British and the French, declared war on the Ottomans in 1911 in order to take Libya.” Good, but then we’re zipped off to a different topic. These vignettes are dispersed throughout the book, mixed with the love stories of two couples, the unsolved murder of the Chief Inspector of Public Health, the tensions between the Greek and the Muslim populations equally populating the island, conflicts between East and Western values, nationalism, a group of rioting rebels, the mildly humorous antics of the Sultn and, of course, the plague. With so many threads to the tale, the reader is turned into a detective trying to find out what’s going on and why.
There are some amusing moments. For example, to find who murdered the Inspector, the local police could simply torture people to find the culprit or rely on the methods of the Sultan’s favourite fictional character, Sherlock Holmes. We later find out that the Sultan reads the Holmes detective stories so he can learn how to murder people in a way no one would find out ‘who done it’!
Pamuk did not set out to write a novel comparing 1901 with today’s pandemic. He began the book five years ago. Does the recounting of the corpses, puss, burials and quarantines become depressing to read, particularly in such detail? Not really, because you don’t get involved in the characters. You just don’t feel empathetic. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between the 1901 management of the plague and the 2021 management of COVID.
In 2005 Pamuk publicly said the Emperor was responsible for the Armenian genocide and killing of Kurds. Charges were brought against him, and his books were burned by nationalists. Pamuk now lives in the United States. He still regards Turkey as the ‘sick man of Europe’.
Pamuk won the Novel Prize for Literature in 2006. He has written 16 books, the best known are The Innocence of Objects, The Museum of Innocence, The Red-Haired Woman and Histories Of Istanbul.
The translator is Ekin Okap
Published by Penguin, an imprint of Hamish Hamilton, 2022
Review by Carol Dance