Fiction:Like Ireland, Turkey takes its writers seriously, but the stakes can be higher there than here. Elif Shafak was already a literary celebrity in Turkey when charges were brought against her last year under a 2005 statute for the offence of "insulting Turkishness", writes Richard Tillinghast.
If convicted, she could have served three years in prison. The charges, like those brought earlier against Orhan Pamuk, though they were eventually dropped, have made the 35-year-old Shafak's name well-known in the West.
It is not the case , as the publisher claims, that this charge was brought "by the Turkish government", but rather by a group of ultra- nationalist lawyers who have been responsible for the indictments against Pamuk and others.
Death threats have been made against Pamuk and Shafak by extremists of the same ilk that assassinated the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Denk last January. Turkish culture is fractious and volatile. Nationalists, Islamists, the Turkish military, and liberals such as Pamuk and Shafak are locked in a battle for the nation's soul. Ironically, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "moderate Islamist" party have been strong backers of Turkish membership in the EU. Shafak's vision of a tolerant, pluralistic Turkey reflects the secular, Europeanised atmosphere of a multicultural Istanbul, which now finds itself under siege from reactionary forces.
Shafak divides her time between Istanbul and the US, and has written her last two novels, The Saint of Incipient Insanities and The Bastard of Istanbul, in English. I prefer to read her in Turkish, difficult as that is because of her labyrinthine sentences and arcane vocabulary. Despite great fluency, her English is not completely colloquial. Like everyone, she writes more expressively in her native tongue.
Both her recent novels speak to today's world of emigration, trans-national identity and ethnic hybridity. Bastard tackles the legacy of the forced migrations and massacres of Armenians in the chaos surrounding the death throes of the Ottoman empire. The subject is taboo in Turkey, yet it is hard to understand precisely why. Most nations, particularly great powers, have something dark and vicious in their histories.
Research into what actually happened is not complete; many scholars feel that, terrible as these events were, "genocide" does not accurately describe them. Nevertheless Shafak is courageous in raising an episode in their history most Turks strenuously deny. Ironically, Turks and Armenians have much in common. Most older Armenians speak Turkish, often as their first language. Their cuisine is practically identical. In the US there is a consortium of Armenian and Turkish scholars seeking rapprochement.
The Bastard of Istanbul takes a while to decide what kind of novel it wants to be. An insider-outsider, both in the US and Turkey, Shafak is able to turn a satirical eye on both cultures, and the book starts out like a satirical novel. Much of the satire is funny and pointed but does little to advance the plot.
Many secrets come out when Armanoush, a young Armenian-American, flies to Istanbul on impulse because she wants to see the home of her ancestors. She stays with her mother's second husband's Turkish family, and there she becomes friends with Asya, her young Turkish cousin. Armanoush boldly tells her hosts about the forced migration and slaughter of Armenians. She recites what her relatives in the US have told her, and her stories are typical of Armenian refugee narratives. Yet her new friends have never heard about these things.
IN THE END, the novel has an old-fashioned plot worthy of Dickens, Sarah Waters, Michael Faber or Charles Palliser. Coincidence is at the heart of it. Yet Shafak gives the narration a particularly Turkish twist, commenting, "Life is coincidence, but sometimes it takes a djinni to fathom that".
Asya's Auntie Banu, a headscarf-wearing clairvoyant, has two djinns (the word has been anglicised as "genie") at her command, Mrs Sweet and Mr Bitter. Mr Bitter is a gulyabani, a sinister spirit who "had come from places where the wind never stopped howling. Mr Bitter was very old, even in terms of djinn years":
Ill-omened soldiers, ambushed and massacred miles away from their home, wanderers frozen to death in the mountains, plague victims exiled deep into the desert, travellers robbed and slaughtered by bandits, explorers lost in the middle of nowhere, convicted felons shipped to meet their death on some remote island . . . the gulyabani had seen them all.
Mr Bitter has witnessed the forced marches:
"I was a vulture," he commented bitterly, the only tone in which he knew to talk. "I saw it all. I watched them as they walked and walked and walked, women and children. I flew over them, drawing circles in the blue sky, waiting for them to fall on their knees."
"Shut up!" Auntie Banu bawled. "Shut up! I don't want to know."
Despite the bitterness of the past it describes, this is a magical novel of reconciliation and inclusiveness. At one point, Aram, an Armenian Turk, Asya's mother's boyfriend, says to Armanoush:
"This city is my city. I was born and raised in Istanbul. My family's history in this city goes back at least five hundred years. Armenian Istanbulites belong to Istanbul just like the Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, and Jewish Istanbulites do. We have first managed and then badly failed to live together. We cannot fail again."
If a Turk can write a novel like this, there is hope that Aram's, and Elif Shafak's, vision of the future will come to pass.
Richard Tillinghast's eighth book of poetry, The New Life, is due out in 2008. He and Julia Clare Tillinghast have recently finished Dirty August, a selection of translations from the Turkish poet, Edip Cansever
The Bastard of Istanbul, By Elif Shafak, Penguin Viking, 360pp. £16.99