Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

Just finished this 600-odd page book this evening, after perhaps two weeks since I first started reading it.

Birds Without Wings tells the various entertwining stories of the people of a small Anatolian town called Eskibahce in the Ottoman Empire, in the years preceding and following WWI and the Turkish War of Independence. In Eskibahce, as all over the empire, people of different religions and ethnic groups live side by side and mostly peacefully, uited by the Turkish language, and with friendships and intermarriage making these different groups inseparable in places. Each chapter reads almost like short story, detailing key events in the lives of the people of Eskibahce, including the games of the towns children, the unlikely friendship between the Orthodox Greek priest and the town's Imam, and more sinister events such as an attempted stoning and the exhumation of a corpse.

Alongside this, the tale of Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk, is interwoven, as the people of Eskibahce find themselves caught up in a world where the distinction between Turkish and Greek becomes seemingly more important and leads to all sorts of trouble. The story is told through multiple voices, including an omniscient 3rd person, and through several of the characters, both as they live the events of the book, and as they look back on them in later life.

I really loved this book. de Bernieres presents colourful, flawed but likeable characters, and I found the stories of life in Eskibahce charming and moving. I was gripped by the sense of inevitability brought in through the reflective passages and the inclusion of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rise to power, and really wanted to find out what would happen to the characters.

The charming and often humourous exploits of Eskibahce were eventually replaced by sensitive but honest and horrific details of the events of the decade of war that the people of the Ottoman Empire faced in the early twentieth century. Some of the stuff included - in just enough detail to be shocking without being too horrible to read - was unimagineably awful, and opened my eyes to a side of fairly recent history that I had no idea about before reading this book.

I found that towards the end of the book the narrative of Ataturk's rise to power took over a bit. This was necessary to explain what would eventually happen to the Eskibahce characters, although I felt that it dominated a little bit too much and that, despite Bernieres' drawing in of the novel's characters in places, this section of the book could have done with a more human element, to bring it down to a human level and to make it a little less dry. I started to wish that I could read something else at this point, although the end of the book was worth the wait and I couldn't put it down until I had devoured every word.

An important aspect of the book that I haven't yet mentioned is de Bernieres' writing itself. I have never read him before but it strikes me that he writes extremely well. Characters are excellently drawn, humour and poignancy are both handled deftly and sensitively, and his choice of language is an absolute lexical feast. Despite using such rarified words as 'mommixity', 'foofaraw', and 'dunderpate', de Bernieres' prose remains highly readable, and even when I didn't know the exact dictionary definition of a particular word (particularly some Turkish terms), the language is handled so beautifully that the meaning is still clear and the words delicious. de Bernieres uses them sparingly, always using the perfect word for the occasion, whilst visibly revelling in such nuances of language. Beautifully written.

A really fantastic read. de Bernieres writes fantastically well and in Birds Without Wings has created a moving story about the highs and lows of being human in the face of adversity. A great book.