‘Wings’ a look at darkest desires
“Arms aren’t wings,” a woman in Louis de Bernieres’ violent, heartbreaking, yet resplendent new anti-war novel tells a small boy who longs to fly. “If we had wings, do you think we would suffer so much in one place? Don’t you think we would fly away to paradise?”
Oh, yes, we would fly. We would soar. We would escape the bloody whims of history; the terrifying inevitability of change; the fear, horror and death that bloom when powerful forces decide that invisible borders — geographical, cultural, religious — count more than people.
In the grand, sweeping style of his international blockbuster “Corelli’s Mandolin,” de Bernieres masterfully explores the terrible price of love, politics and war — a cost we still insist on paying.
“Birds Without Wings” is a breathtaking, sorrowful account of the Ottoman Empire’s death seen through the eyes of the Turks and Greeks, Christians and Muslims of a tiny coastal town in southwest Anatolia. Like “Corelli’s Mandolin,” which features the inhabitants of the Greek island of Cephallonia during World War II, “Birds Without Wings” traces another turbulent era’s devastating effects on a simple place and its people.
Fueled by rich storytelling and superb historical detail, the novel is set in “the age when everyone wanted an empire and felt entitled to one, days of innocence perhaps, before the world realized, if it yet has, that empires were pointless and expensive, and their subject peoples rancorous and ungrateful.”
Turkey bridges the gap between East and West, its largely Islamic population governed by a secular democratic government, and so the novel feels disturbingly pertinent. But de Bernieres never fails to keep his characters in sharp focus as he offers us an impassioned argument against aggression and blind nationalism, lamenting its cost with a fervor disturbingly relevant to our current war-heightened sensibilities.
He is also a magnificent storyteller, bringing to life humble Eskibahce and its rustic inhabitants, among them Ali the Broken-Nosed, not to be confused with Ali the Snow-bringer; Mehmetcik and Karatavuk, best friends who mimic birds as boys and grow up to fight different battles; the homeless Dog, whose ravaged visage frightens everyone; the lonely Rustem Bey, the town’s wealthy landlord; and Ibrahim and Philothei, Muslim and Christian, betrothed since childhood but doomed to tragedy.
Religion rarely polarizes. “Life was merrier when the Christians were still among us, not least because almost every one of their days was the feast of some saint,” Iskander the Potter, one of our narrators, confides. The town’s imam and priest respectfully greet each other as “Infidel Efendi.” Brides adopt their husbands’ faith without argument. Muslims stand at the back of the church during Christian services; Christian feet tread the clay that shapes Muslim pots.
All this will change with the rise of Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern Turkey, whose story de Bernieres also tells in short, succinct chapters that grow more complex as the soldier’s dreams expand.
War, quite simply, appalls de Bernieres. His lengthy, unnerving descriptions of the battle of Gallipoli — the book is dedicated partly to his grandfather, who was severely wounded there — detail atrocities with brutal, numbing repetition.
“There had been fighting for one month, and the dead had never been collected,” Iskander’s son Karatavuk tells us. “Some bodies were swollen up, and some were black, and they were seething with maggots, and others were turning to green slime, and others were fully rotted and shriveling up so that the bones stuck out through the skin. A lot of them were built into the parapets and fortifications, so that you might say they were being employed as sandbags.”
“Birds Without Wings” is not without moments of humor, but atrocity haunts it: children crucified and disemboweled by the Greeks, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna. “I blame men of God of both faiths,” Iskander says. “I blame all those who gave their soldiers permission to behave like wolves.”
In the face of horror, de Bernieres can offer only the meager comfort of man’s ability to endure and adapt. But he has given us a marvelous novel nonetheless, one whose insight into the darkest human desires is unerring and indelible.
Oh, how we long for paradise. Oh, how we long to fly.