Louis de Bernieres: Birds Without Wings

The new mastodon-sized novel from Louis de Bernieres (Captain Corelli's Mandolin) is also set around the Mediterranean: the eastern end this time, as the 20th century begins and the Ottoman Empire ends.

It starts from a small Anatolian town where dignified, melancholy Islam and exuberant, worldly Christianity have got along for more than a millennium, where a mother-to-be typically drinks from a bowl inscribed with verses from the Koran, then sleeps with a crucifix on her stomach.

So far, so commendable. But you can sense from page one that it's going to end in tears — plus death and madness.

They are all experienced by the central pair of creed-crossed lovers: Ibrahim the Muslim goat-herd, who bleats at inopportune times, and the gorgeous Christian Philothei, with her eyes like deep wells. No, not stagnant.

The outside world comes swaggering in. There are bandits, Balkan Wars and World War I; Greece's invasion; displacings and disembowellings, forced marriages and marches. There is far too much overall.

Narrative becomes epic; background becomes travelogue. There are times when you feel it may take you longer to read this novel than its events took to unfold.

Story after story streams by. Islamic and Christian small boys play together, then endure together against the strange tall Anzacs who fight in boots, shorts, and tattoos of naked women.

Mustafa Kemal grows up, nursed by the descendant of a black slave. Nobody has an ordinary suburban upbringing in de Berniere's world. Iskander the Potter and the ugly Drosoula have a turn at the narrative. There's an appalling stoning, a beggar with a hideous smile, interludes of several pages while the author provides potted histories. There is even an Italian officer in an occupying army.

Characters brim with metaphors and aphorisms: "Destiny caresses the few but molests the many ... the seeds of Nazism are waiting only for the dark rain ... birds with wings know nothing about borders."

The writing, meanwhile, brims with just about everything. Time does not pass; instead "the sun has long since dried the rain that washed away the blood upon the rocks". People don't feel down; they "pass through the gate of unconquerable sorrow ... into a cataract of grief".

Indeed there is a big bold story in here. Make that three or four stories. Give yourself a week, cancel the housework and social calendar, and you'll have a terrific time with it. And then you'll almost certainly want to read something spare and understated.

Vintage
$26.95 

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.