Getting Real

MY NAME IS RED *

By Orhan Pamuk

Translated From the Turkish by Erdag M. Goknar

Knopf. 417 pp. $25.95

Orhan Pamuk is the most popular living Turkish writer, both at home, where his novels are unprecedented bestsellers, and in the West, where he has earned comparisons to Borges and Calvino. As those names suggest, his books can seem postmodernist, dealing as they do in unreliable narrators and shifting identities. But in My Name Is Red, his latest novel, the flatness of the characters, the multiplicity of plots and narrators, the highly self-conscious reference to myth and archetype, are sponsored by Pamuk's antique Turkish and Arabic sources; he is not so much rebelling against European realism as detouring around it.

In summary, My Name Is Red sounds like a familiar kind of book -- a murder mystery, with a love story thrown in. In 1591, a man named Black returns to Istanbul at the summons of his uncle, a government official commonly called Enishte (Uncle). It was Black's declaration of love for Enishte's young daughter, Shekure, that led to his banishment 12 years before. But now Enishte needs his help in completing a secret commission from the sultan. Enishte has been to Venice, where he discovered the secrets of Western perspectival art, and he has convinced the sultan to have an illuminated book made using the new techniques. Four masters of the Ottoman style have been enlisted to produce the illustrations; but just as Black arrives, one of the artists is murdered.

But to read My Name Is Red merely to find out if Black wins Shekure, and if the murderer is discovered, is deeply unsatisfying and often tedious. The novel is narrated by a dozen different characters (and a few inanimate objects), one short section at a time, so that the action frequently halts and doubles back. Nor is this compensated for by the liveliness and variety of the narrators; none of them is a full or vivid presence, and the stilted, woolly translation is unable to sharply differentiate their voices. They form not a chorus but a din.

This problem is most acute when Pamuk introduces us to the three illustrators, Olive, Butterfly and Stork, one of whom has killed the fourth. Because they remain names rather than distinct characters, it is impossible really to care which is the murderer, although the mystery is drawn out to great length. Even the lovers, Black and Shekure, never come into focus. Their feelings change wildly from one section to the next; their actions seem random, unmotivated.

All of this would spell disaster for a novel that attempted realism. But Pamuk's real attention is elsewhere: He is concerned above all with the techniques and ideas of the Ottoman artists as they confront the power of Western art. Olive, Stork and their brethren are in the peculiar position of practicing representational art in a culture that strongly prohibits the making of images. They get around this ban by remaining illustrators and illuminators of books, rather than painters; they maintain the fiction that they are merely decorative craftsmen. But they have all the pride and ambition of Michelangelo, and Pamuk succeeds in giving the reader a sense of the richness and complexity of their art.

Enishte's project represents a spiritual crisis for the Ottoman illustrators, of which the murder is only a minor consequence. The advance of Western portraiture has shown them that their own images are unrealistic, and their artistic pride is wounded into rivalry. Yet their culture makes a powerful case against realism, which is synonymous with vulgarity and blasphemy. Pamuk draws the reader into this mental world, where art is both sacred and profane, representational and abstract, innovative and traditional. These paradoxes culminate in the notion that the greatest illustrators must go blind: Only by losing their sight can men see as Allah sees.

Pamuk's use of Ottoman illustration is similar to Thomas Mann's use of German music in Doctor Faustus: It is at once his subject and his guiding metaphor. Pamuk's painters, caught between the traditions of an Eastern past and the seduction of a Western future, remind us of Turkey itself, the Islamic country that has embraced secularism most ardently. And Pamuk's own flat, unreal, repetitious fiction is analogous to the chastened art of Butterfly and Stork. To a reader accustomed to depth, perspective and accuracy, it cannot help but seem inadequate. *

Adam Kirsch writes frequently about contemporary European fiction.