This historical novel takes us through the momentous bit of Turkish history between 19, with the narrative viewpoint alternating between a helicopter-view of the big events of the career of Mustafa Kemal and a tortoise's-eye-view of the inhabitants of a remote, small town on the Anatolian coast near Fethiye (then called Telmessos). It's important to remember that while this is a novel and the individual stories it tells are born of the author's imagination, the book is based on the real and terrible brutality of the Great War and its lasting aftermath. Instead of a punch I felt a weight of sadness that slowly grew, with each small revelation, into the certainty that none of these characters' lives would end well. Halfway through the book I felt that de Bernieres was about to punch me in the gut, to hit me with a single, devastating event, but he is much more subtle than that.
But by the end I realized the book was built in the manner of a dry stone wall at first there is just a pile of rocks of all shapes and sizes, but the craftsman carefully places each piece and when he is finished, his creation is a thing of lasting strength and beauty. Sometimes I thought these bits were random and scattered. It's a big book, a sweeping story filled with lots of characters who are introduced a chapter - and a small bit of their story - at a time. This is truly an impressive piece of work. Victory at Gallipoli fails to save the Ottomans from ultimate defeat and, as a new conflict arises, Muslims and Christians struggle to survive, let alone understand, their part in the great tragedy that will reshape the whole region forever. Far away from these small lives, a man of destiny who will come to be known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is emerging to create a country from the ruins of an empire. But with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the Great War, the sweep of history has a cataclysmic effect on this peaceful place: The great love of Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim, a Muslim shepherd who courts her from near infancy, culminates in tragedy and madness Two inseparable childhood friends who grow up playing in the hills above the town suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the bloody struggle and Rustem Bey, a wealthy landlord, who has an enchanting mistress who is not what she seems. Birds Without Wingstraces the fortunes of one small community in southwest Turkey (Anatolia) in the early part of the last century - a quirky community in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries and where friendship, even love, has transcended religious differences.
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