Review: The Red-Haired Woman, by Orhan Pamuk

Faber & Faber, £16.99

Review by Brian Morton

THE Red Haired Woman is a wry modern version of the Oedipus story. Cem dreams of being a novelist, but decides to spend a summer before cram school and university working as apprentice to a well-digger. Turkey in the 1980s is industrialising fast and Istanbul is turning from a pre-modern city of a few million souls to the vast sprawl it is today. Empty plains and plateaus conceal plentiful supplies of water, but it still has to be extracted the old-fashioned way. Given the young man’s interest in dreams and mythology, well-digging is an occupation that lends itself all too readily to metaphor, but Pamuk doesn’t overboil the symbolism of two men, young and old, middle-class and poor respectively, digging down into the earth. Cem’s leftist father absconded years before, perhaps imprisoned, but more likely just in flight from his marriage, so Master Mahmut becomes a surrogate parent. The two men dig for water on a plateau a few miles outside Istanbul. It’s hard and unpromising work, but Master Mahmut will not admit defeat and hews ever deeper into the ground. Over the course of the summer, when the day’s work is done, he and Cem wander into a small town to drink raki and smoke. Cem becomes fascinated by a mysterious red-haired woman, who seems to recognise him. She is an actress who performs morality playlets in an itinerant tent theatre. Twice Cem’s age and married, she offers a brief sexual initiation before disappearing, as itinerant actors are wont to do.

Inevitably, given the heavy armature of references and epigraphs from Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Freud, Cem kills Master Mahmut. It isn’t clear whether the act is involuntary and accidental, or unconsciously intended, or even whether it happened at all. Nor is it clear whether Cem is fated to act out the rest of the Oedipus myth, if he hasn’t already. Its core, of course, has less to do with murder and incest, than with the discovery of self. In the evenings, before wandering down to Ongoren to indulge what seems to be a shared obsession with the Red-Haired Woman (it’s just possible sexual jealousy lies behind Mahmut’s “accidental” death), the old man tells Cem stories from the Koran, his own personal Theatre of Morality Tales. More widely read, Cem one night responds with Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus story. His motive is unclear, but there is an undertone of threat as well as insubordination, and the moment of violence quickly follows.

Cem flees the scene and returns to the city, his guilt apparently undetected. The well the men have been digging is still dry. They have cut down through soil and sand and hard rock and into more pale sand below, finding nothing but fish fossils and shells. When Cem returns to Istanbul (in the rain, significantly), something oceanic seems to open in him. While Part I of The Red-Haired Woman is largely concerned with a single month, Part II covers years in a matter of pages, and in a deceptively discursive style closer to that of Pamuk’s great Istanbul novel The Museum of Innocence. There are similarities of plot as well: the family dynamic resembles that of Kemal Bey in the earlier book; Cem’s engagement and marriage to Ayse has parallels with Kemal’s attempts to balance engagement to Sibel, while he carries on a passionate but doomed love affair with his cousin Fusun; above all, though, there is the same overwhelming sense of modern Turkish society – expressed as comedy of manners in The Museum of Innocence, but as a clash of new and old in The Red-Haired Woman – as a thin veneer of sophistication over a darker and more atavistic culture.

Like most of Pamuk’s novels, this one is also in essence a mystery. Cem’s real father is alive, and Master Mahmut’s real fate may not be what the boy thinks. As the older Cem flies out from Istanbul, he looks down on the shrinking gap between Ongoren and the metropolis. Having abandoned his dreams of being a writer, Cem now works as an engineering geologist, obsessed by the strata of sand, shale and schist he once dug and sorted for Mahmut. He nurses a certain remote guilt over his action, or failure to act responsibly, in that distant summer, but his life, and his sexuality, have moved on. Who, then, is the Red-Haired Woman? There are, of course, revelations and discoveries to come, but predictably there is no single answer to that question. It is never remarked how similar Pamuk is in plotting and characterisation to Charles Dickens: the same sense of a whole society caught in miniature, and more effectively in caricature than in realistic portraiture; the same confident chronology; the same mixture of affection and ironic detachment. Pamuk’s regrettable reputation as one of the few non-English-language Nobel laureates that monoglots might actually want to read has tended to blunt the profound sophistication of his narrative art. This isn’t a book for the sun-lounger, or not only so. It’s a deep, honest, poignant, painful exploration of humanity’s ability to cover up its own essence with civilised ideas and behaviours. At its heart is something midway between Koranic wisdom and a tent-show morality tale. Its conclusion is that finding the self really does involve violence as well as desire, but that the violence – which is dishonesty – is really directed inward.