Nights of Plague (Turkish 2021, English 2022) By Orhan Pamuk

 

I am a big fan of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ve just finished reading his latest novel Nights of Plague, an English translation of which was published at the end of 2022.

Nights of Plague is fiction, very thinly disguised fiction.  Some names and places have been changed to “protect the innocent,” though there aren’t many of those to worry about. It is set in 1901 during an outbreak of the plague on the island of Mingheria, a state of the Ottoman Empire which has already entered its final decades. Mingheria, like many islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population which is nearly evenly split between Greek Christians and Muslims who do not like or even trust each other.  That Mingheria looks and sounds like Cyprus and/or Crete, is a part of the thinly disguised fiction.  

The novel has a complicated plot, or should I say plots. Pamuk tells his story from the perspective of a historian researching the plague.  His primary source materials are the letters written by Princess Pakize (the daughter of the deposed Sultan, and niece of the current Sultan) to her sister.  Princess Pakize is married of to a doctor, an arranged marriage that actually works out well. He is what we today would refer to as an epidemiologist.  The Sultan sends them off to Hong Kong, to study the plague outbreak there. Once onboard ship however they are rerouted to Mingheria where the Sultan’s chief epidemiologist (a Christian) has just been murdered. The Princess and her doctor husband are protected by a bodyguard, “the Major,” who plays an outsized role in this story.

Pamuk continues the story splitting it into multiple plots.

First of course is the plague itself which has begun to spread wildly on the island as both Christians and Muslims routinely resist all efforts to quarantine.  The similarities between the spread of the plague in 1901 and the resistance to quarantine during the Covid pandemics in 2019 are real, as is the economic impact of both.  Keep in mind that Pamuk started this book in 2016, before the Covid pandemic was even known. 

Second, and vintage Pamuk, is the political intrigue taking place in the Sultan’s family, and the ever-worsening decline of the Ottoman Empire, as international powers prepare to move in for the “kill” enacted at the end of World War I.

And the third major plot is the murder mystery aspect of the story which remains just somewhat unresolved at the end of the book, without enough evidence to be certain. Pamuk’s references to the “Sherlock Holmes” method of solving mysteries are great, as is the teasing “Chapter 51” from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

Recommendation:  Absolutely, though a knowledge of Ottoman and Turkish history is almost a requirement.