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Gardens of Water
by Alan Drew
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
I have a soft spot for authors who don't pander to readers by translating every single foreign expression, allowing the reader to know from the context that efendim, for example, means "excuse me" in Turkish rather than having the speaker repeat himself in English as if he were subtitled.
Alan Drew's debut novel Gardens of Water tells the story of a family caught up in the aftermath of the 1999 Marmara earthquake near Istanbul. Sinan Basioglu, is a devout (not to be confused with fundamentalist) Muslim living in small town a ferry ride away from a generally less devout Istanbul. Sinan is also a Kurd, a refugee from Government-inspired and perpetrated violence in Turkey's East.
The counterpoint to Sinan's family of four, including a boy of nine undergoing his circumcision ceremony and a teenage daughter, is a family of expat American teachers with a seventeen-year-old son. The two families are drawn together through death and love, a relationship fraught with differences of class, religion, culture and mores.
The plot is, if not exactly inventive -- there's very much a Romeo and Juliet angle to the story -- then certainly unconventional enough that relating any of it might spoil it for the reader. And Drew has a deft hand in describing Istanbul, the ferries, food and, we hope, although we can never really know, what goes through the mind of a working-class Muslim man trying to protect and provide for his family.
But setting a story in a foreign country, especially a country as complex as Turkey, with foreign (or rather, local) protagonists can be a considerable challenge. The story must be compelling, the setting both well-researched and accessible: there must be a good reason why the story need be set in the exotic locale. One has to be very good indeed, a Louis de Bernieres, or, perhaps, treat the subject matter somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as does Jason Goodwin in The Janissary Tree and its sequels.
So, in spite of all its success in storytelling and describing what must be for most readers an alien culture and mindset, Gardens of Water perhaps tries to do too much. In a single story are entwined the issues of the Kurdish-Turkish struggle, the drama of one of Europe's most destructive recent earthquakes, the sometimes insidious role of Christian missionaries, the clashes between modern and traditional cultures and between Christian and Muslim mores, Turkey's urban-rural divide, and the complete lack of a social safety net and resulting third-world conditions that can still exist on the fringes of Europe, any one or two of which might well have provided more than enough material for a novel.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
by Alan Drew
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
I have a soft spot for authors who don't pander to readers by translating every single foreign expression, allowing the reader to know from the context that efendim, for example, means "excuse me" in Turkish rather than having the speaker repeat himself in English as if he were subtitled.
Alan Drew's debut novel Gardens of Water tells the story of a family caught up in the aftermath of the 1999 Marmara earthquake near Istanbul. Sinan Basioglu, is a devout (not to be confused with fundamentalist) Muslim living in small town a ferry ride away from a generally less devout Istanbul. Sinan is also a Kurd, a refugee from Government-inspired and perpetrated violence in Turkey's East.
The counterpoint to Sinan's family of four, including a boy of nine undergoing his circumcision ceremony and a teenage daughter, is a family of expat American teachers with a seventeen-year-old son. The two families are drawn together through death and love, a relationship fraught with differences of class, religion, culture and mores.
The plot is, if not exactly inventive -- there's very much a Romeo and Juliet angle to the story -- then certainly unconventional enough that relating any of it might spoil it for the reader. And Drew has a deft hand in describing Istanbul, the ferries, food and, we hope, although we can never really know, what goes through the mind of a working-class Muslim man trying to protect and provide for his family.
But setting a story in a foreign country, especially a country as complex as Turkey, with foreign (or rather, local) protagonists can be a considerable challenge. The story must be compelling, the setting both well-researched and accessible: there must be a good reason why the story need be set in the exotic locale. One has to be very good indeed, a Louis de Bernieres, or, perhaps, treat the subject matter somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as does Jason Goodwin in The Janissary Tree and its sequels.
So, in spite of all its success in storytelling and describing what must be for most readers an alien culture and mindset, Gardens of Water perhaps tries to do too much. In a single story are entwined the issues of the Kurdish-Turkish struggle, the drama of one of Europe's most destructive recent earthquakes, the sometimes insidious role of Christian missionaries, the clashes between modern and traditional cultures and between Christian and Muslim mores, Turkey's urban-rural divide, and the complete lack of a social safety net and resulting third-world conditions that can still exist on the fringes of Europe, any one or two of which might well have provided more than enough material for a novel.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
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