Nights of plague
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Penguin Hamish Hamilton / 2022
Pages: 683
This is one hefty door-stopper of a book, decidedly strange among the author's long list of novels which led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for literature and a heap of other awards.
It tells of a fictional island between Rhodes and Crete, inhabited by two different ethnic groups, Greeks and Turks, whose relationships are superficially amicable but disintegrate in times of stress.
The date is at the beginning of the 20th century and the plague has arrived on the island. The island's governor is an ineffectual person with a very personal take on the problems of the island. When the plague arrives, the governor and the most influential segments deny the evidence, which is what the plague needs to spread out more.
The Turkish Sultan, overlord of the island, sends his expert on containing the plague but he is promptly killed.
We get to know what happens next from the letters that the Sultan's niece, who arrives with the Sultan's expert, writes to her sister. We get to know this from a recent meeting in the South of France between the Sultan's niece, now a very old lady, and her great-grandchild.
But in between a whole chain of events takes place - a nation is born, with its own new language, the plague spreads and overcomes, heroes are born and die, and an island known for its mutual tolerance is taken over by Islamic fundamentalists.
Despite its length (and its weight) the book is an easy read and flows from one episode to the next.
I kept thinking there is a similar story waiting to be told about the different bouts of the plague our country has had to face in its history, both under the Knights and under the British.
In both cases there were two ethnic groups involved, the Maltese and the Knights/the British. History tells us that the foreign groups got away with minimal deaths but the Maltese suffered most deaths. The hardest hit was Qormi with its bakeries, and Valletta with its dense population.
The Maltese may have accentuated the deaths through organising pilgrimages and processions until they realised the importance of people keeping away from each other, just as we found out during the Covid crisis.
Pamuk uses the book to slip across some messages addressed to his Turkish audience, which is most that he could get away with saying, considering the situation in the country and the previous near-misses in the recent past.
It does not emerge in this book, which pointedly takes place in an island in the middle of the sea, but he continues to live in and breathe the air of his birthplace, Istanbul.