Birds Without Wings (Hardcover)

When the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin sat down one wintry eve to enumerate the properties of novelistic prose, he named polyphony as a core element. The crush of a hundred voices, confounding each other, supporting each other, filling in gaps and carving out fresh mysteries-this is what we demand of a good, meaty novel. And Louis de Bernières’ latest offering, Birds Without Wings, fits the bill handsomely. A hundred voices, at least.
Christian Greeks, Muslim Turks, Armenians and Jews make up the chorus, happily coexisting under the Ottoman empire’s millet system, wherein religious liberty was guaranteed. Guaranteed, that is, unless a World War were to break out.
The inhabitants of Eskibahçe, a folksy town in early twentieth century Anatolia, have no cares for such worldly worries as the novel opens. Men play endless games of backgammon at cafes, children terrorize each other in the countryside, and the only leader among them-the wealthy landlord Rustem Bay-is so distracted by the confusions of his love life that his tenants enjoy a relative anarchy, bending scripture and mythology to their own (sometimes cruel) whims.
De Bernières interweaves an early biography of Turkish general and statesman Mustafa Kemal (later President Kemal Atatürk) with the stories of the townsfolk he’s invented, to an intriguing effect. He has a habit of holding global politics and drawing room intimacy in the same hand-and he holds them fast. As in the case of Tamara, Rustem Bay’s arranged wife, who is forced into prostitution when discovered in the arms of the man she truly loves:

“Tamara weeps silently as she cradles in her arms the hundred-fathered syphilitic child to which she has just given birth. The disease has ravaged the empire ever since the introduction of compulsory military service, and the child is white-faced and distorted.”

By the novel’s halfway point, Rustem Bay complains of “a terrible wavering in my soul” and the reader may wish he’d been stricken with something worse than wavering-say, syphilis. But justice does not come easy in this mayhem. De Bernières unfolds his narrative both impassively and movingly-stony but boiling, like the face of a mother moved beyond grief.
The critic Bakhtin also referred to novelistic polyphony as “dialogism”, which lends an important shade of meaning: myriad voices, if held in a dialogue, will not run invisibly in tandem. Indeed, they may exchange blows in the best prose. These frictions of tone, character, and motive, create the combustions that keep us reading.
There are classic novelists who revel in dialogism (Charles Dickens, Fay Weldon) and there are modern examples, too-A.S. Byatt’s Possession is a stew pot extravaganza of voices, hotly competing for rank; and any of de Bernières’ novels are equally complex. Actions and circumstance are allowed to be good or evil-but humans play host to the twin voices of Bakhtin’s dialogism.
Rustem Bay, having cruelly discharged (and nearly murdered) his wife, catches the next camel to Istanbul in search of a beautiful mistress. “It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets”; we learn this, ever mindful of the crowded intermingling throughout Turkey that preceded the first World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He purchases, after some ugly haggling, a Circassian Mistress, Leyla, whose real name is Ionna and whose real background is Greek. Straddled with more lies than can be healthy, Rustem Bay returns to Eskibahçe, “Leyla” in tow, herself toting a vial of animal blood which, inserted at the right moment, will simulate the very fine membrane called Honour.
Somewhat akin to Paris Hilton taking up residence in small-town America, Leyla descends from cosmopolitan Istanbul to Rustem Bay’s hometown with a resigned grace. She enlists the beautiful child Philothei, daughter of Polyxeni, as a servant. “I would like a girl who is very pretty and young. I need someone who is pretty, otherwise my eyes will be in a bad mood all the time.”
Rustem Bay consents and now has two outrageous beauties stalking his vast manor. Philothei, whose eyes are “dark as well water” is blessed (or cursed) with beauty surpassing all precedent. She is a force of nature. Upon her arrival on this shabby planet, the ethereal Philothei (“beloved by God” as her name suggests) becomes the wonder of the townspeople, who proceed to jabber on about her inestimable charms for the next 600 pages.
But the courtesan Leyla knows a deeper truth about beauty: “It’s a kind of loneliness that you never escape, but if you don’t want anyone to know you, to know you as you really are, then beauty is the perfect protection.”
Philothei’s best friend is ugly beyond redemption, but bumbles faithfully alongside her godlike peer. Drosula is her name, a lovely bit of onomatopoeia. “Beauty is precious,” says Drosula as an old woman, reflecting on past events. “And the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away, and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers.” Drosula being ugly; her body will never teach ardent young men the tortures of fate.
But she has time to philosophize, as do all who are pardoned from beauty’s draft.
Beauty and war are the two great reckoners in Birds Without Wings. As the Gallipoli campaign edges toward its disastrous conclusion, Karatavuk (a too-young boy from Eskibahçe) writes his worrying mother: “I kiss your hands, and I carry your face in my heart.” But, later, “I will say that if there is no God, then everything is inexplicable, and that would be very hard for us, but if there is God, then He is not good.”
As Drosula avoids the perils of beauty, Karatavuk’s father avoids the call to war. This is Iskander the Potter, a simple man who helps to open and close the sprawling tome. A man in love with the easy logic of epigrams, he means to deal in harder stuff than words.
“Every birth entails a death,” Iskander the Potter simply notes when the beautiful Philothei is born.
And his shrug of a comment balloons from there, arriving ultimately at a profound judgment on the vanity of any concrete history. All land is stolen land, the reader learns. And as for religion: “the first casualties of a religion’s establishment are the intentions of its founder." Fatalism, that snake with a mouthful of its own tale, permeates de Bernières’ novel.
Is there any redemption? Nothing so grand. Consolation, perhaps, in the beauty of the work itself.
His eighteenth century style, where everything is laced with an old-fashioned, Walter Scott essence, can make the narrative gilded as a fairy tale. No Hemingway dry bones for this one. “I like to sort of wallow,” de Bernières told Margaret Reynolds in a 2001 interview. That prodigious detailing (whether the result of exhaustive research or a gifted imagination) fills de Bernières’ characters up as fruits fill up their peels-so they brim, burst, with flavour. The wealth of sentiment he provides can leave one staring out windows, suddenly in love with strangers.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, also known in film circles as That Embarrassing Nicholas Cage Vehicle, was one of the finest novels produced in the 1990s. By the same author, Birds Without Wings now emerges as a multi-voiced paean to what Yeats so knowingly dubbed “a terrible beauty.”
Yeats’ poem, “Easter 1916”", refers to the botched Irish nationalist uprising but might easily play coda to Birds Without Wings and the life of poor Philothei:

“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”
Michael Harris (Books in Canada)

"a rich, mottled chorus, an amalgam of subplots that weave and complement each other in such a way that the town itself might be better called the central character. . . . For those who do not devour it immediately, Birds Without Wings will sit as great epics sit, on one's shelf demanding to be read, making one feel irresponsible and guilty, provoking resolutions of 'must read this before death.' Do read it before you die. It would be a terrible thing to have missed a work of such importance, beauty and compassion."
—Camilla Gibb, The Globe and Mail

"De Bernières has unquestionably crafted a masterpiece."
—The Chronicle Herald

"De Bernières is at his finest when he allows us to experience hardships and horrors through the lives of the villagers. He writes movingly of the battle of Gallipoli from the Turkish point of view, and the brutal, dehumanizing conditions of trench warfare."
—The Seattle Times

"Highly impressive in its ambition and relative readability, to say nothing of its relevance for a time when the intersection of religion, nationalism and war is once again reshaping the world."
—National Post

"De Bernières demands complete attention from his readers, but that close attention required is well rewarded. . . . Part novel, part historical document. This is a difficult book that stretches the traditional form of the novel."
—Edmonton Journal

"This is a work that will move you deeply. A profound sadness and world-weariness pervade it, though at times it moves us to anger and pity…. What makes the work so poignant is de Bernières’ exquisite ability to draw complex and fully realized characters about whom we come to care…. De Bernières will not let us forget that these things have happened and will happen again."
—Kitchener-Waterloo Record

"De Bernières distributes his scorn and his compassion evenly, concerned as he is with questions that cut across lines of nationality and religion. An undertone of righteous disgust at what the powerful inflict on the powerless is felt throughout this book. It’s affecting and not pedantic, because de Bernières is so good at depicting the good things that always seem to get trampled…. With a book as rich as Birds Without Wings…we’re free to sit back and enjoy a huge story well told."
—The Gazette (Montreal)

"Birds Without Wings is superbly written, gathering people and their hearts and souls and all their baggage of loss and hope together in one place and giving a point to life. It is, in every sense, a sublime book."
—The Irish Times

"An absorbing read about a remote but captivating time. The Ottoman world's break-up is a rich, poignant story, and Mr. de Bernières is a good storyteller. At times he is nearly as good as Dido Sotiriou."
—The Economist

"[Birds Without Wings] bears de Bernières’ literary hallmarks — vast emotional breadth, dazzling characterization, rich historical detail (and gruesome battle scenes), swerving between languid sensuality and horror, humour and choking despair."
—Scotland on Sunday

"He is to be understood not as a one-hit wonder who arrived from nowhere one year and then disappeared, generating whispers of writer's block for the next 10, but as a prolific and ambitious writer with a rather astonishing body of work, notable for its dense lyricism, fierce wisdom, soaring passion and remarkable wit. In this tradition, Birds Without Wings is pure de Bernières."
—The Globe and Mail

"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. . . . One of the most profound and moving books you're likely to read."
—The New Zealand Herald

"The most eagerly awaited novel of the year. . . . In counterpoint to the varieties of love, Birds Without Wings delivers the hideous violence of mechanised warfare. Its 100-page centrepiece, in which Karatavuk (“Blackbird”) recounts the terror, squalor and fitful heroism of the Gallipoli campaign, will have critics reaching for their War and Peace. In truth, de Bernières . . . is too centrifugal and carnivalesque a novelist for the Tolstoy comparison. However, he makes of the carnage a mesmerising patchwork of horror, humour and humanity."
—Independent (UK)

"[Birds Without Wings] bears de Bernières’ literary hallmarks — vast emotional breadth, dazzling characterisation, rich historical detail (and gruesome battle scenes), swerving between languid sensuality and horror, humour and choking despair."
—Scotland on Sunday

"Dazzling. . .a fabulous book in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dickens. . . . So joyous and heartbreaking, so rich and musical and wise, that reading it is like discovering anew the enchanting power of fiction."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Louis de Bernières is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste."
—A. S. Byatt

Praise for Captain Corelli's Mandolin:
"Captain Corelli's Mandolin is an emotional, funny, stunning novel which swings with wide smoothness between joy and bleakness, personal lives and history...it's lyrical and angry, satirical and earnest."
—The Observer

"From the very first paragraph one regrets that 434 pages are not going to be enough...a humanist epic told with such sparkling intelligence, sympathy and control that you can only grovel at the author's feet."
—The Guardian

“Brims with all the grand topics of literature — love and death, heroism and skull-duggery, humor and pathos, not to mention art and religion.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“A wonderful, hypnotic novel of fabulous scope and tremendous iridescent charm.”
—Joseph Heller