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The Advertiser, Australia
August 7, 2004 Saturday
Collapse of the old order
by Chris Brice
A WRIST-SNAPPING, 625-page swirling epic of love and war, tenderness
and savagery, BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS (Secker & Warburg, $49.95) is Louis
de Bernieres's first major work since his celebrated Captain
Corelli's Mandolin was published a decade ago.
Bernieres has said that the reason for the long sigh between the
novels is that he didn't want to write "Captain Corelli twice".
So the conflict is World War I rather than World War II, and the
action has moved from a Greek island to the coast of Turkey.
But there is a comforting familiarity about aromas of pine and olive
groves wafting across rough-hewn hillsides to the vivid waters of the
Aegean, though this time to "where it merges with the Mediterranean".
Essentially, Birds Without Wings is the story of the last years of
the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Turkey during the first two
decades of the 20th century.
It is told through the hop-scotching narratives of the inhabitants of
Eskibahce, a village in southwest Anatolia.
There, Muslims and Christians, Greeks, Turks and Armenians live in
tolerant harmony - even if Christians are called "dogs" or
"infidels", it is "said with a smile, just as were their deprecatory
terms for us" - until divisions in the larger world are imposed and
the old order painfully collapses.
The novel's emotional heart is the doomed chaste love affair of
beautiful Christian girl Philothei and Muslim goatherd Ibrahim.
In the end, Birds Without Wings has just enough highlights - prime
among them a powerful memoir of the defence of Gallipoli against the
invading Allies - to keep it afloat against the weight of a biography
of Mustafa Kemal, later Kemal Ataturk, father of the Turkish nation,
which drones through 20 or more interspersed chapters.
August 7, 2004 Saturday
Collapse of the old order
by Chris Brice
A WRIST-SNAPPING, 625-page swirling epic of love and war, tenderness
and savagery, BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS (Secker & Warburg, $49.95) is Louis
de Bernieres's first major work since his celebrated Captain
Corelli's Mandolin was published a decade ago.
Bernieres has said that the reason for the long sigh between the
novels is that he didn't want to write "Captain Corelli twice".
So the conflict is World War I rather than World War II, and the
action has moved from a Greek island to the coast of Turkey.
But there is a comforting familiarity about aromas of pine and olive
groves wafting across rough-hewn hillsides to the vivid waters of the
Aegean, though this time to "where it merges with the Mediterranean".
Essentially, Birds Without Wings is the story of the last years of
the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Turkey during the first two
decades of the 20th century.
It is told through the hop-scotching narratives of the inhabitants of
Eskibahce, a village in southwest Anatolia.
There, Muslims and Christians, Greeks, Turks and Armenians live in
tolerant harmony - even if Christians are called "dogs" or
"infidels", it is "said with a smile, just as were their deprecatory
terms for us" - until divisions in the larger world are imposed and
the old order painfully collapses.
The novel's emotional heart is the doomed chaste love affair of
beautiful Christian girl Philothei and Muslim goatherd Ibrahim.
In the end, Birds Without Wings has just enough highlights - prime
among them a powerful memoir of the defence of Gallipoli against the
invading Allies - to keep it afloat against the weight of a biography
of Mustafa Kemal, later Kemal Ataturk, father of the Turkish nation,
which drones through 20 or more interspersed chapters.