Orhan Pamuk’s fictional worlds are a little more complicated than David Weber’s. In the Honor Harrington books, an omniscient narrator tells us about the hero’s ongoing battles for the cause of decency and justice, qualities that can almost always be clearly discerned. Her manifest virtues earn her admiration and respect from all sides, eliciting fear and loathing only from a few truly evil galactic scumbags. In the place where Pamuk’s characters live, no one is omniscient, decency and justice are harder to find, and very little of anything can be clearly discerned.
The hero of Snow is Ka, a young Turkish poet. Ka has just recently returned to Istanbul from Germany, where he has spent the last few years in lonely exile. He had fled to Germany after getting into trouble with the Turkish government for engaging in what they considered subversive political activities. He has felt safe in returning partly because the political situation is a bit different now; the very conservative but also very secular government has become somewhat less concerned about leftists like Ka and more concerned about the rise of the Islamists. (This is the period that we now know was the run-up to Recep Erdoğan era.)
Ka still believes in what he calls “human rights, freedom of thought, democracy and related subjects.” But he also sees now that much of Turkish leftist political discourse on these topics consisted of repeating “the wild simplifications of so many well-intentioned but shameless and slightly addled Western intellectuals.” Ka is also in love, or more precisely he is in love with the idea of being in love, with a beautiful woman named İpek. Ka knew her in Istanbul when she was married to a friend of his, a fellow social activist. Now Ka has heard that İpek is divorced and living with her father and sister at the other end of Turkey in the city of Kars. Ka travels to Kars, ostensibly to write an article about the head scarf issues there, but in reality hoping to convince İpek to accompany him back to Germany.
Ka arrives in Kars in a snowstorm. The snow continues to fall heavily and soon the roads and rail lines are closed. The main action of the novel all occurs during the next several days when the city is cut off from the world. Ka is intensely excited when he reconnects with İpek and between them arises a powerful sexual tension. Ka has been unable to write poetry for a year or so, but this new environment inspires him and he writes a whole series of new poems in his green notebook. But he cannot escape the political situation. The many factions in town–several of whom are quite willing to kill and/or die to advance their cause–begin taking steps either to use Ka for their own purposes or to thwart him what they imagine his purposes are. Though he longs to spend time with İpek, Ka can’t help getting involved in complex and violent political events. At first it seems that he is forced to be involved against his will. Once he is involved, however, he begins to think that he can be a player, that he can influence events for his own purposes. Oh yeah.
Snow is not easy reading. Every time I’ve read it I’ve come to a point somewhere in the middle when I’ve wondered if it was worth the effort. Other readers have told me they felt the same. So very much is going on all at the same time. So very many things don’t work out the way you expect them to or the way you wish they would. But as the book continues, as you gradually shed your expectations, you see that it all fits together, that Snow tells a fantastic story, both surreal and heart-rending. The characters are not like the ones you’ve met in other novels. In speech and in action their foreignness is shocking. But, as in all great literature, magic is afoot. A penetrating portrait of strange events in an alien context, something that at first seems interesting but irrelevant, suddenly begins to illuminate the darkness of other places and other times, including the reader’s own.
So, yeah, Snow is worth the effort. And it’s not the only kind of book in Pamuk’s large body of work. Orhan Pamuk is, as my friend Eve puts it, crazy as a coot, but he’s an impressive writer. I really liked The Museum of Innocence, a somewhat unusual love story, and Istanbul: Memories and the City, a beautiful and melancholy memoir of a mostly vanished cultural milieu. It is for their sake also that Snow was saved from the purge.