Birds Without Wings
Author: Louis de Bernières
Publisher: Vintage
Date of Publication: June 2005
This is a story with a beating heart.
A small village in southwestern Anatolia. Ottomans who speak in Turkish, write in Greek, and pay homage both to Allah and to Christian icons. Children, already betrothed, play at the noises of goats and birds. Women tend to the young and the dead, and men tend to their crafts and their games of backgammon. Nothing remains the same once the land that is to become Turkey enters war in the early twentieth century. New patriotism, new loyalty, and new sacrifices change not just political order, but people.
Birds Without Wings is incredibly compelling and equally dense. Bernières shapes his story through his characters, their lives, and the changes that both undergo. The characters are given individual definition by Bernières’ skillfully varying style and diction. Birds Without Wings is historical fiction, though in a deeply personal sense; the fullness of the characters enriches the substantive sense of the period in which they exist. Perhaps the only drawback of this approach to storytelling is that it limits and directs how Bernières relates critical background. Interwoven with the history of the village of Eskibahçe is the history of the Ottoman Empire’s conflict and downfall in the early 20th century. Rather than just saying what happened and risking a disruptive tonal shift, Bernières writes the experiences of several characters in those conflicts. One is Atatürk, Turkey’s founder, called by his birth name Mustafa Kemal in the book. The others are small town inhabitants caught in sweeping, violent political fervor. The transmitting of Ottoman and Turkish history through those vessels both humanizes large-scale history and allows Bernières to direct focus to particular messages. However, this approach - keeping international turmoil intimately linked with personal turmoil - also limits the scope of what the author can share.
For all the words spent explaining that critique, take this as a counter: this book is powerful in its content, direct but not suffocatingly polemic in its messages, and luxuriously rich in its prose. It is not a happy book. Death and disappearance are frequent. The pain endured in Eskibahçe as a result of frustratingly senseless political decisions suggests the suffering of millions more. Yet Birds Without Wings has the qualities that leaven a book hefty in content and emotion. There is consistent humor, both obvious and subtle. There is love of all types, tested and strong. There are themes that give the book clear purpose. There are little details given to each character, presented like a gift of intimacy to the reader who witnesses them. Bernières has meticulous control over his writing, giving weight to each sentence and a sense of thoughtful care to the story at large. This is a book whose characters’ voices will rise vibrantly from the page, and whose content will captivate those drawn to stories both pertinent and lyrically potent.
