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Book: Vile And Valorous In 1880s Turkey

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  • Book: Vile And Valorous In 1880s Turkey

    VILE AND VALOROUS IN 1880S TURKEY

    Suburban Edition
    March 8, 2010 Monday

    Review by Maureen Corrigan

    THE WINTER THIEF
    By Jenny White
    Norton. 400 pp. $24.95

    Jenny White's new historical suspense novel, "The Winter Thief," is
    set mostly in Istanbul in 1888, but throughout my reading of it I kept
    thinking of Ken Loach's award-winning 1995 film, "Land and Freedom."

    Loach's look at the Spanish Civil War focuses on an idealistic young
    Brit who joins the International Brigades to fight the fascists. I
    remember seeing the film with a friend who was uncharacteristically
    silent afterward. Eventually, he shook off his mood to say one thing
    in response to the story: "I would have been killed." My companion
    wasn't being self-aggrandizing; in fact, he was probably right.

    Loach's movie brought home the fact that our lives are pawns to our
    convictions as they intersect with the whims of the historical moment.

    That, too, is the message of White's ambitious novel, which is more
    interested in exploring the unforeseen consequences of political and
    personal loyalties than it is in fully cranking up the machinery of
    the standard thriller.

    The novel opens on a scene of passionate naivete that, of course,
    comes to no good end. Vera Arti is a new bride who has defied her
    wealthy Armenian family and secretly married a communist organizer
    named Gabriel. On a snowy Christmas Day in Istanbul, Vera makes her
    way to the office of an Armenian publisher. In her hands is a copy
    of "The Communist Manifesto," which she implores the publisher to
    print so that "the Armenian people will find the strength to resist
    oppression . . . by joining the International Movement, by standing
    shoulder to shoulder with other oppressed peoples around the world."

    Vera has only an elementary understanding of the rhetoric she's
    spouting. She gravitated toward communism out of compassion for the
    suffering masses and because of her love for Gabriel. The newlyweds
    are merely stopping in Istanbul before they journey to a utopian
    commune called New Concord, situated in an abandoned monastery in
    the mountains, where some of their comrades have already settled.

    Unbeknown to Vera, Gabriel has arranged for a contraband cargo of
    guns to be shipped to the commune. And, oh yes, he also has robbed
    the Imperial Ottoman Bank of a sultan's ransom in gold and jewels in
    order to keep the commune afloat. When Vera is nabbed by the secret
    police after her foolish excursion to the publisher, Gabriel has
    to decide whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of his
    hapless young wife.

    Enter Kamil Pasha, the hero of this story, as well as of White's
    two earlier suspense novels set in 19th-century Turkey. Kamil is a
    special prosecutor in the secular courts. A moody loner attracted to
    modern culture, he is drawn into the search for Vera, which puts him
    at odds with a fiend named Vahid, the head of a rogue branch of the
    secret police. For vile reasons of his own, Vahid has convinced the
    sultan that the New Concord commune is allied with a secessionist
    movement and must be wiped out -- along with the neighboring villages.

    Realizing that a massacre of innocents is in the making, Kamil charges
    off with a small contingent of soldiers to do battle with Vahid and
    his forces.

    That's just a skimming summary of the busy plot of "The Winter Thief."

    White, a professor of anthropology who specializes in Turkey, adroitly
    tosses in period detail as well as romance, political intrigue and
    brutal battle scenes. But "The Winter Thief" really distinguishes
    itself by the intelligence of its smaller moments, when characters
    take stock of their limitations against the larger demands of history.

    During the siege at the monastery, for instance, a
    philosopher-turned-commune-dweller ruefully reflects on how
    ill-prepared to fight he is. "I'm a philosopher," he tells an
    admiring young woman. "We collect the cream clotted at the rim of
    every civilization. We don't need to see it milked and churned." By
    the end of the novel, Kamil's own modernist self-doubts about
    his actions in the aftermath of battle become close to crippling:
    "He had chosen life over honesty, one kind of justice over another,
    but he knew not everyone would agree that he had chosen well."

    Out of the purest of motives -- a desire for social equality,
    a yearning for personal happiness, a wish to share a book with a
    larger audience -- disaster can ensue. That vivid opening image of
    the ingenuous Vera clasping her incendiary book stays with a reader
    long after the shooting stops and an uneasy peace has been restored.

    Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches
    a course on detective fiction at Georgetown University.
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