Birds Without Wings
by Louis de Bernieres
Secker and Warburg $220
Birds Without Wings touches all the epic themes: love and war, the danger of moral certainty and the paradoxes of the human condition. It also bears de Bernieres' literary signatures: vast emotional breadth, dazzling characterisation, rich historical detail, gruesome battle scenes, and a swerve between languid sensuality and horror, humour and creeping melancholy.
It follows some of the inhabitants of Eskibahce, literally the Garden of Eden, a town in southwest Turkey at the turn of the 20th century. Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Greeks co-exist, bound by history, inter-marriage and friendship, until all is disrupted by the first world war.
de Bernieres says he wanted to write 'a book with no goodies or baddies', so the flaws of the good citizens of Eskibahce are exposed alongside their virtues. They can stone an alleged adulterer, Tamara, wife of Rustem Bey, their modern-thinking rural landlord, 'with gleeful cruelty', and yet band together when they are threatened.
Rustem Bey, afflicted by an aching loneliness, takes a Circassian mistress, the indulgent Leyla, who 'plays the oud delightfully' and seduces Bey with garlic orgies. Their poignant relationship is just one of those explored by de Bernieres, who paints characters that haunt long after the book is put down.