NIGHTS OF PLAGUE BY Orhan Pamuk
Spoiler Alert ***
Orhan Pamuk is not a new writer for me. He is a Turkish writer and a Nobel prize winner, and MY NAME IS RED is the first of his works that I read. It was (to me) a fascinating historical fiction about the westernization of illustration in 16th-century Muslim manuscripts that I elected to read because I had developed an interest in Islamic culture while studying British literature of the same era. I have published several academic essays on British-Muslim interactions and am long familiar with various Islamic practices of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, including the “bastinado” torture; female legal rights and harem politics; and the political murder of superfluous princes. Some 400 years beyond that period, in NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, Mr. Pamuk offers us the fictionalization of early 20th-century Ottoman sultans who yearn for a degree of westernization but remain committed to despotism, torture, female seclusion, and the disempowerment of potential rivals.
I was unable to plow my way through two other Pamuk books—a novel and a discourse about novel writing—and NIGHTS OF PLAGUE also presents a challenging read. It is not abstruse or highbrow, but the pace is glacial and frequently interrupted by backstory. Many pages are fully loaded with intriguing detail but also with repetitive scenic descriptions and zealous character biographies.
That said, this layered novel of Ottoman politics, romance, and revolution is well worth reading if only because it sheds light on a span of 20th-century history that many of us in the west—taken up as we have been by two World Wars and the Cold War—would wish to understand more fully as the 21st-century proceeds, particularly as it relates to ongoing tensions among autocratic and democratic governments.
The themes I touch on here in nearly 700 pages of narrative include:
Creation: birth and obligation, authorship and agency, and language.
Power: politics, religion, and rebellion at the close of the Ottoman Caliphate
Medicine: science, godliness, and modernity.
Creation:
The late-named narrator of this fictional/historical interplay is Mina. She is a (fictional) character born in the (fictional) Ottoman colony of Mingheria as the descendent of the (fictional) Princess Pakezi whose father, Murad V, was an actual Ottoman sultan deposed by his brother, Abdul Hamid, for madness.
Mina loves her island birthplace and strives to become its historian. The author’s choice to deploy a female narrator who is married with children and remains active in the contemporary world is a provocative foregrounding of Muslim female agency and authorship, and, yes, she faces significant challenges including a long period of enforced exile.
Moneyed enough to choose her path in life, Mina is the culminating ideal for all three of the novel’s most assertive and intelligent women. The primary female character is her great-grandmother, Princess Pakezi who is lucky enough in her arranged marriage to be paired with the skilled and sensitive plague physician, Dr. Nuri. Having spent her entire life restricted to her father’s residence, Pakezi is educated and writes frequent letters to a sister in Istanbul. In these letters, she describes her days in Mingheria following her husband’s assignment there to combat a bubonic plague outbreak. Mina’s possession of these letters allows her to reconstruct the conditions of the colony during the plague outbreak and the concomitant political upheaval.
Confined since birth for political reasons, Pakezi is immediately quarantined in Mingheria, and only later, as temporary queen of the island after its successful rebellion against Sultan Abdul Hamid, does she enjoy some freedom of movement. Other women displaying admirable agency include an outspoken Muslim girl, Zeyneb, who marries the island’s revolutionary leader—only to find herself almost immediately confined by quarantine and pregnancy—and the Mingherian Governor’s gossipy Christian mistress whose independence remains inviolate.
Mina’s agency derives from her close relationship with her maternal grandmother who is dedicated to Mingheria. In school, Mina has eagerly absorbed the island’s revolutionary history and the fundamentals of the ancient language. This language is the cornerstone of nationalist aspiration but, by the time Mina composes her narrative, the notion of a common tongue binding the island’s inhabitants is already a faded hope. Scholarship, authorship, and the study of western literature—so dangerous even to men during the Ottoman era—open the portal to a degree of westernized freedom for women.
Paradoxically, Princess Pakezi’s tyrannical uncle enjoys European fiction and orders many novels translated for him. He is particularly fond of Sherlock Holmes and insists that the plague doctors he dispatches to Mingheria employ the scientific method to resolve the crisis. While the doctors are well-trained and apply their knowledge for the good of all, the sheiks who control the Muslim faithful refute science and brandish the fatalistic words of the Koran.
Power:
The “sentimental novel” aspect of this work, a principle so dear to Mr. Pamuk, reaches its denouement in Geneva, with Dr. Nuri and Princess Pakezi, now 80 years old, living, ironically, in a hotel they rarely leave. They host Mina as a child of 10, an interview that fuels her ambition. But in adulthood, Mina is banished from the island for decades—a ploy to withhold property legally owned by the Princess and her heirs. The novel’s conclusion is the tale of Mina’s struggle to acquire the materials she needs to bring her history to completion.
Already when this novel begins, the Ottoman Empire is the Sick Old Man of Europe and, after the stripping off of its dependencies and colonies, was abolished in 1924.
By the time of the caliphate’s abolition, (fictional) Mingheria had been independent for some 20 years. The revolution was no idealized triumph. After a brief flirtation with a monarchy and Islamic theocracy that exacerbates plague deaths, Mingheria falls to a former revolutionary who builds up the army and exercises despotic power similar to the Sultan’s.
With this snippet of fanciful history from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, Mr. Pamuk offers readers insight into the burgeoning power of Western nations to inspire resistance in those governed by ancient strictures and behavioral norms. Islamic awakening to secular humanism and popular culture in NIGHTS OF PLAGUE is represented in the struggle on this tiny half-Christian, half-Muslim island of Mingheria.
Perhaps Mr. Pamuk has addressed his motivation for publishing this story in 2016, and perhaps it has nothing to do with another Great Power currently oppressing its satellites or neighbors. But I perceive a parallel between Mingheria and Ukraine, which is currently battling Russia to prevent its development of a new Imperium.[1]
Turkey’s President Erdogan appears to be playing for both sides in Russia’s vengeful war against the new democracy of Ukraine. Perhaps he hopes to reclaim lost territory from Ukraine in Crimea and enlarge his nation’s borders, but he certainly hopes to leverage a stronger economy and bolster his nation’s international profile. Whether Turkey will work with the west to reduce authoritarian aggression is not yet clear. Perhaps we will discover that Turkey’s government—and Erdogan’s self-interest—are permanent markers of the Ottoman past, that Turkey is just as dependent on the coercive repression of humanitarian and democratic ideals as its neighbors-–the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Hungary.
Medicine:
Abdul Hamid’s (fictional) attempt to contain a bubonic plague outbreak in the Ottoman Empire in 1901 foregrounds the social upheaval caused when entrenched tradition rubs up against modern science.
Numerous epidemics have beleaguered physicians of the 21st century. Among others, they include Ebola, SARS, and Covid 19. Epidemics, pandemics, and plagues—with all their biblical inflection—are symbols of chaos, threat, and disaster.
The science described in the novel is distinctly western and humanitarian–disinfectant, ratsbane, compassion, and isolation. Of course, Covid 19 had not yet surfaced when Mr. Pamuk chose an epidemic to illuminate how western science might undermine social cohesion and political power, but the analogy works perfectly.
The murders and attempted murders of Abdul Hamid’s quarantine physicians in Mingheria offer a perfect parallel to the threats leveled against Dr. Fauci and his co-workers in combatting Covid 19. Human responses to infectious medical threats are probably similar worldwide: some people will comply with prophylactic measures and medical care; some will trust in fate or the language of religion and faith; and some will simply be unmoved by their neighbors’ or strangers’ suffering.
Like Covid physicians today, the doctors that Abdul Hamid dispatched to Mingheria to curb the plague by scientific means find themselves stymied on several levels. Their natural allies, the rich and powerful, flee the contagion; malign individuals plot to assassinate the scientists; religious leaders are skeptical of science and preach fatalism in the face of death; and a “benighted” population falls back on faith and magical amulets.
Both sides in the Mingherian struggle to combat the plague resort, in the end, to violence. I’m not aware that any modern governments battling Covid 19—save perhaps for communist China—have used physical violence to force people to accept isolation, masks, or vaccinations, though breaking up potentially combative anti-vaccination demonstrations has drawn criticism. But just as the fictional bubonic plague outbreak in Mingheria fractures a placid, multi-ethnic colony, Covid has fractured modern families, schools, communities, and perhaps entire nations. Not only does the virus infect and kill relentlessly but its appearance among us has been propagandized by agents of chaos to divide us, even to the extent of promoting an unreasonable fear of science and the efficacy of modern medicine.
In short, this novel is worth reading on many levels. I’m sure it will open far more avenues of speculation than I can represent in this short review.
1.Long before Russia existed in any form, Slavic Crimea fell to the13th-century Golden Horde Tatars, then to 15th-century Ottomans, and then to late 18th-century imperial Russians. The peninsula was returned to Ukraine at the dissolution of the Soviet Union but was illegally captured by Russia in 2014. Control of the area is significant for Ukraine and the stability of its new democracy and impetus toward humanitarian ideals. It may well be the inspiration for this novel.