I was encouraged to read this book following our recent visit to Turkey. I'm so glad I did. It might be fiction, but it's strongly rooted in the early 20th century history of this region, giving an overview of the life and times of Kamal Ataturk, and the bloody, tempestuous history of the former Ottoman Empire and parts of the Balkans. The book centres on the lives of the inhabitants of Eskibahçe. We meet its Muslim and Christian inhabitants, living in neighbourly harmony together. There's Rustem Bey, their neighbourhood aristocrat; imams, priests, teachers, beggars,prostitutes, boys who grow up to be soldiers, girls who grow up to be wives, or soon-to-be-wives. We become rooted in the simple rhythms of life in this community. So when it all goes wrong, when war starts, we care. This is a disturbing but compulsively readable book which serves as a helpful and accessible introduction to 21st century Turkey, as well as being a wonderful story, with many skilfully interwoven threads. ( )

Wonderful! We visited the ruins of a town very much like this one last summer during our car trip around Southwestern Turkey. This novel made the ghosts we felt there come alive. ( )

This started off very slowly, the first third felt like a struggle, but thereafter it picks up. It is written with lots of chapters by or about different people who live in the one village plus Mustafa Kemal. This makes it difficult to get to grips with the cast initially, but pays dividends for sticking with it later on. Gradually his story and that of the village comes together - just as the village is torn apart. If told now the events here would be described as ethnic cleansing and it would be a crime against humanity, about 100 years ago this wasn't the case.This tells a story of great sweep and scope, in the founding of Turkey, and it tells of individuals caught up in those events. Its the contrast between the big and the small scale story at work here and how that fundamentally changes a place and its people. ( )

Dealing with the death rattle of the Ottoman empire and birth of the nation of Turkey, de Bernieres views great world events, as he usually does, through the eyes of a small village studded with memorable and deeply empathetic characters. His account, thoroughly researched but at times plodding, of the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the ponderous, tragic exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey explores themes de Bernieres reiterates through his corpus, namely human violence and deprivation juxtaposed with our inexhaustible capacity for love, as well as his firm belief in good times and fornication. As an added bonus, there are characters and plot lines that qualify it as a prequel to Corelli's Mandolin. Perhaps it could have benefited from another round of editing; it could be just a bit shorter. Thoroughly enjoyed it, as I do with all of his novels. ( )

This historical novel takes us through the momentous bit of Turkish history between 1900 and 1923, with the narrative viewpoint alternating between a helicopter-view of the big events of the career of Mustafa Kemal and a tortoise's-eye-view of the inhabitants of a remote, small town on the Anatolian coast near Fethiye (then called Telmessos).

Rather like Ivo Andrić in The bridge on the Drina, de Bernières shows us the Ottoman Empire as a polity that for centuries made it possible for people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds to live together in reasonable harmony and without slaughtering each other, even if that life involved a lot of poverty and deprivation for most of them, and no political or legal rights worth speaking of.

The Muslims and Greek Christians who live in Eskibahçe speak the same language, have all been living in Anatolia for centuries, intermarrying from time to time, and don't think of themselves as "Turks" and "Greeks" until nationalist agitators come along and tell them that's what they are. As far as de Bernières is concerned, the "historic grievances" that led to the Greek occupation of Anatolia and the subsequent mass deportations of 1923 had their origins in the political ambitions of people like Venizelos and Mustafa Kemal, amplified into a revenge-cycle by the sort of atrocities that take place automatically as soon as you start an armed conflict.

There is some great, if rather romanticised, storytelling in this book: the Eskibahçe characters are full of interesting human quirks, and de Bernières cleverly mixes in local colour and traditions. The descriptions of Gallipoli from the viewpoint of an Ottoman soldier in the trenches are gripping too. But the political rant in the narrator's own voice in the "history" chapters doesn't seem to work as well: de Bernières is (understandably) so angry at the abuses and humanitarian disasters that leaders on all sides allowed to happen that he makes a lot of sweeping accusations that go beyond the evidence he has shown us. We're inclined to believe his assertions that Kemal, Venizelos, Lloyd George and the Kaiser are a bunch of irresponsible murderous ruffians, of course, and that all Italians except Mussolini are saints, but it would be nicer to be allowed to draw our own conclusions rather than have to take that as axiomatic. And of course, the fact that we know this is a British writer speaking on behalf of Ottoman/Turkish/Greek characters doesn't help.

Oddly, the thing I noticed most about this book before reading it, the fact that it's nearly 800 pages long, didn't really seem to matter. The use of multiple different types of narration results in quite a bit of repetition, but it felt like the sort of book where you could just dig in and let all that wash over you. De Bernière's writing isn't the sort of thing where you have to read a sentence several times. It would probably work really well as an audiobook. ( )