This is by Orhan Pamuk, and -- just as I found with Istanbul: Memories and the City and The Museum of Innocence -- he makes you work... Which is not a bad thing. Stories don't have to come pre-chewed and ready to gulp down, after all. A reader needs to be willing to put in a bit of effort now and then.

My Name Is Red was first published in Turkish in 1998, and became a bestseller. The English translation, by Erdag M. Goknar, appeared in 2001. The action is set in the Istanbul of 1591, during the reign of Sultan Murad III, who helmed the Ottoman empire from 1574 until his death in 1595. His was a time of prolonged wars on the eastern and western borders. But he was also a great patron of the arts.


The Ottoman Empire just before the novel's action begins

The first descriptor I'd reach for is "intricate". We have 59 chapters, shared among 20 different narrators (not all human; even if human, not all living; and definitely not all reliable). The milieu is that of miniature painting. So the various accounts contain plenty of what is apparently called ekphrasis (a verbal rendering of a visual representation), as well as stories and parables centred on the intricate art of the miniaturist.

In terms of genre, it's a mixture of murder mystery and love story. The book opens with the testimony of a murdered man, Elegant, who used to work as a gilder in a team of master miniaturists, and whose killer will eventually be unmasked thanks to a series of clues planted throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Black returns after an absence of 12 years, hoping to woo Shekure, the woman he fell in love with but could not secure back then; they do eventually end up together, although it's a strangely fraught path. Most of all, however, My Name Is Red is an exploration of the winds of change in art.


Another real book, bought from a real bookshop...

Pamuk ably illustrates the currents involved.

First, we have the ultra-conservatives, led by Nusret Hoja from Erzurum. They have very strict interpretations as to what Muslims can and cannot depict. They also want to destroy dervish lodges, and ban coffee. And they're not above exercising lethal violence to put their point across. Luckily, they're in the minority (for the time being).

Second, we have the classic artists who work according to Islamic rules of representation. The aim here is to depict the view of God, "to remember the magnificence that Allah beheld and left to us". As Avkar Altinel puts it, "Islamic art -- or rather, since Islam forbids figurative art, Islamic manuscript illustration, which ushers figurative art in through the back door -- opts for stylisation rather than the 'realism' of seeing, and thus seems to strive to express an unchanging truth that lies beyond the shifting perspectives that unfold in and as time."

According to this scheme of things, individual style is a defect for the miniaturists: "For them, the perfect illustrator is not one who tries to express his unique vision of the world. Indeed, the perfect illustrator does not even see the world but, having long ago gone blind as a result of his labours, draws it without any contaminating random input from his individuality, rendering it as it truly is 'in the memory of Allah'."

When an artist does develop a distinctive way of rendering something, it is seen as a fault -- but such a difference can also become a handy way to track down a killer...

Everything is on the wane, though. The most glorious art seems to lie in the past, and the splendid times of the old masters are the prelude to a story of decadence and decline. It's also a fine line to walk. How do you invite readers to appreciate God's creation through looking at a miniature, yet not also invite them to admire the painter's act of creation?

And third, we have the "Frankish" style of painting. It is the Venetian masters who have popularized this conception in Istanbul. They "depict what the eye sees just as the eye sees it," says one of the characters. By pursuing realistic portraiture, complete with shadow and perspective, this technique represents a move away from the view of God: "The art of perspective removes the painting from God's perspective and lowers it to the level of a street dog." And in memorializing people's exact faces -- freezing them in time, totally recognizable -- it panders to human vanity.

The Sultan is beguiled by the Venetian style, and secretly commissions a book to be made in this vein, which he intends to present to the Doge. This is what is causing all the trouble. The Hoja's following is, of course, incensed when rumours of this work trickle out. And the classicists are troubled, too. Where will this all lead?

One of the characters fears that the end point will be a disorienting wasteland: "If we fall sway to the Devil and continue betraying everything that has come before in a futile attempt to attain a style and European character, we will still fail... The proficiency of the Franks will take centuries to attain. Had Eniste Effendi's book been completed and sent to them, the Venetian masters would have smirked, and their ridicule would have reached the Venetian Doge... They'd have quipped that the Ottomans have given up being Ottoman and would no longer fear us." This is a sad prospect: "Thus withered the red rose of the joy of painting and illumination that had bloomed for a century in Istanbul, nurtured by inspiration from the lands of Persia... For painting itself was abandoned; artists painted neither like Easterners nor Westerners."

The book points clearly to a sense of loss: "In Pamuk’s words, 'If you ask me, My Name Is Red at its deepest level is about the fear of being forgotten, the fear of art being lost.' When Pamuk leads us into the world that his words have created, we become lost in a world that is also, regrettably, now lost."

The character Enishte, Black's uncle and the mastermind of the secret book, sees things more philosophically: "To God belongs the East and the West. May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated." Then again, he ends up dead...


Shirin sees a portrait of Khusraw. This story features frequently in the text


Khusraw at the castle of Shirin

In all, even though I fear I didn't appreciate all the finer points about art, I found it a very atmospheric read. I loved the cultural linkages that take us right across Asia: "If the Mongols hadn't brought the secrets of red paint -- which they'd learned from Chinese masters -- to Khorasan, Bukhara and Herat, we in Istanbul couldn't make these paintings at all."

And I loved the scenes of old Istanbul. Particularly brilliant is the section set in the Treasury, in which Black and Master Osman, the chief illuminator in the royal atelier, comb through heaps and heaps of art in a search for clues to a distinctive way of painting a horse that they think will identify the murderer.

Parts of it are quite funny, too, though often in a macabre kind of way. The inanimate-object narrators often address the reader in almost pantomime style; and the way Shekure keeps her father's death concealed (until the marriage with Black can be sorted out) is grotesque, but also has elements of farce.

For Altinel, the darkness that infuses the background of the novel "is counterbalanced by the charming, poignant love story in the foreground". Actually, I found the love story quite dark too. Shekure never seems to really know what she wants, and her love for her children (called Shevket and Orhan) outshines anything she can put on the table for her various suitors. (Pamuk's mother, incidentally, was called Shekure, and yes, he also has an older brother called Shevket... At the end, the fictional Shekure tells us she has entrusted her son Orhan with the telling of the tale, but we should probably take his rendering with a pinch of salt: "For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn't a lie Orhan wouldn't deign to tell." Pamuk showed up in The Museum of Innocence as well. I'm not sure if this is clever, or overly arch.)

Having just had a bad experience at the eye clinic, all the references to blindness made me feel literally sick... Not only do miniaturists go blind because of the taxing nature of their work, but other characters are blinded or blind themselves. It's horrible. But there is an idea behind it: "There is a perception, frequently expressed in Red, that 'seeing' without using one’s eyes constitutes a more perfect form of vision... To gain legitimacy in later years, some artists even pretended to be blind. On more than one occasion in the story, artists blind themselves in order to achieve a more idealistic vision of the world -- a world viewed without the interference of external stimuli, half remembered and half imagined -- just the way God sees it..." I get it. Even so. Shudder...


Bihzad, a renowned miniaturist. In Pamuk's account he blinds himself

In sum, then, a little overwhelming, but also rewarding. David Damrosch sums up the overall impression very nicely: "Pamuk’s novel is a gallery of miniatures, each of its fifty-nine chapters another glowing portrait in a few pages, and at the same time all of these spots in time form a mosaic built up to create a panoramic landscape, a sprawling historical novel in the grand style, overlaying East and West, past and present, mysterious obscurity and radiant vision."

You can't deny Pamuk's uniqueness.