Reprint: The White Castle

Some books, even as you're reading them, are telling you they'll need to be read twice, and so it was with The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk, as you'll be aware, won this year's Nobel Prize for literature, a decision that was surprising on literary grounds -- Pamuk is quite young, and not all that weighty. From my perusal of reviews of his work, he seems to like to fiddle within genres, in the sort of way Margaret Atwood does, or Joyce Carol Oates. However his nomination was easily understood on political grounds: Turkey had only escaped by the skin of its teeth from prosecuting him for "insulting the image" of the country in his writings, by not denying the Armenian genocide strongly enough.

The White Castle is his first novel, written in 1979, and weighs in at a pleasing 145 pages. Turkish publishers clearly have more sense than those in the English-speaking world, who equate quality and quantity despite the clear evidence that the relationship is inversely proportional.

The names of Kafka, Calvino and Borges sprang immediately to reviewers' minds, and while I don't agree with the first of those -- Pamuk uses dissociative techniques to create what Brecht called the Verfrämdungseffekt, but he lacks any hint of Kafka's moral position -- the other two are appropriate if presumptuous.

The story, reduced to its bare bones, concerns a young Venetian captured by the Ottomans and given as a slave by a pasha to a Turkish sage/scientist, who wants to milk him of his Western knowledge. The two seem to resemble each other (we never know for sure if anything asserted is true) but their relationship grows more and more symbiotic until they're virtually, and in fact, interchangeable. The conceit is that they represent the two sides of an East-West dichotomy, but the problem with that is that there really isn't a dichotomy involved: both are rationalists with no time for religion, be it Christ or Muhammad. One is more active, and the other more passive, but masters and slaves are like that. The outcome of the story, not to give too much away, stresses their similarities rather than their differences.

The reason I'm convinced the book has to be read twice is that it's formally constructed like one of those MC Escher drawings: it all makes sense until you look a bit closer, when you realise it's actually logically absurd. Now, there will be those who turn off the moment I mention form, but if that's so, you'll hardly have got further than the names of Calvino and Borges above. I closed this book with an admiring smile on my face, actually looking forward to coming back for the second shot, when I'd be able to ignore the "story" such as it is, and set to cracking the code. The very last page caused me to go through that pull-out shot thing Spielberg did in Jaws with Chief Brody on the beach. Or the shock you felt in Rosemary's Baby when you suddenly realise what's going on.

You either love it or you hate it, the sort of writing that is a pleasure because of the formal structure. It's what you're liking if you like a well-made crossword-puzzle clue, or enjoy a detective mystery, or admire the audacity of a fugue. Pamuk, in this book, shows he's quite capable of the technique required. That's good enough for me. But if you're looking for human insights, social meaning or psychological verisimilitude, perhaps you'd better wait for my next Book Report, coming soon.

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk is published in English by Faber and Faber in the UK, and by Vintage in the US.