Louis De Bernieres: Birds without wings

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

This is one of the great novels about the early 20th century and the emerging modern world, an epic of human disaster, on small and grand scales. Against the background of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, armies march, populations flee, and mountains of corpses lie rotting, the landscapes of horror brought fully to our imaginations in terms so visceral we could weep.

Actually, calling it a novel is misleading. This is a hybrid, part novel, part straight historical recount, especially in its intermittent chapters following the career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, man of destiny, which make no pretence at being fiction, and where de Bernieres allows history to be its detailed and confusing self.

It is a passionate tract, if polemical in parts ("the primary epiphenomena of any religion's foundation are the production and flourishment of hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy" the narrator, who appears to be the author, insists), which may upset some people but gives the book a core of steel.

The story begins in 1900 in a village in what will become southwest Turkey, where Muslims and Christians live together in peace, melding traditions.

But all the while the great forces of imperialism are gathering to carve up the world ("it was the age when everyone wanted an empire"). Eventually, the Muslim men are conscripted to fight for the Sultan against the Allies, and later for the emerging Turkish state against Greece. The Christians and other ethnicities, such as the Armenians, are variously persecuted, enslaved, evicted, murdered.

For 10 years the Muslim soldiers fight and de Bernieres takes us, horrifically but with enormous sympathy, to Gallipoli and other sites of destruction, before wrapping things up in the 1920s, with the creation of Ataturk's modern state.

Religious faith is a big question in the novel, these wars heralding both the retreat of God into an empty sky, and the emergence of a new fundamentalism, a "conventional piety" with which we are all too familiar almost a century later.

We see the seeds of many of the world's wars here. As de Bernieres writes, "History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards ... All war is fratricide."

I've made it sound awfully grim, and it is certainly imbued with authorial disgust and horror. However, de Bernieres also writes with great sweetness, and his characters spring endearingly to life out of the most unlikely material — the aga who causes his adulterous wife to be stoned, the bitter Greek nationalist, the dour Orthodox priest, the adulterer herself — he finds and triumphs their individuality and humanity, setting it against the interminable vengefulness of the big picture.

Baggy and overlong in places, this is nevertheless one of the most profound and moving books you're likely to read.