An impressive example of
this complexity of the apparently simple can be found in The Red Haired Woman
by Orhan Pamuk. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that examples
need not be listed. These life stories take many forms, from chronological
sequence to end-of-life recollection, from jumbled memories to self-analysis.
Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and,
crucially, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental
originality until the end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.
The Red Haired Woman is in
the three distinct parts. The novel’s principal character is called Cem, though
the narrative is well developed before we are aware of any name. In the first
part, Cem is still at school. His impoverished family cannot raise the cash to
enable the lad to attend a crammer to assist his studies, so he takes a holiday
job labouring for a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that
there are complexities in these familial relationships. We are in Istanbul,
where we habitually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had
not sprawled to its current extent and perhaps where certain things were not
discussed openly.
Mahmut, master of his
trade, is the well digger. He and his two helpers begin to work on sloping
ground in Őngőren which, at the time, is a sleepy little place beyond the city
limits, where everyone knows everyone else's business and where modernization
is just on the horizon. The well diggers go about their task during the day and
retire to a bar in town most evenings. There is a theatre group in the town,
and one of its members is a thirty-something woman with red hair. Cem becomes
obsessed with her beauty and, as often is the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction,
the sensation becomes all-consuming for this young and impressionable man.
Stubbornly, the well excavation does not yield its goal and Cem extends his
stay in Őngőren. Perhaps predictably, encounters with the red-haired woman do
much to educate the young man. Eventually the labourer leaves the project in
strange circumstances before it is finished to return home to Istanbul, leaving
behind in Őngőren things that will continue to haunt him.
In part two of The Red Head
Woman, we meet Cem again, but now he is an adult, university trained - so the crammer
the labouring paid for did at least some good - and on the way to becoming a
rich property developer, a significant but perhaps not major force in
Istanbul’s modernisation. He is aware of much that he left behind in Őngőren,
since the summer of well digging has left many indelible memories. These are
brought into sharp focus when a contract to redevelop parts of the area comes
across his desk and Cem decides to pursue the project. He thus needs to
re-visit to the area and re-tread the only partially recognizable paths he trod
during that personally influential summer some three decades previously. Some
of the characters he knew those years ago are still around. Some of the issues
that motivated dissent are still in focus.
Part three of the book is written
after Cem's involvement with Őngőren has concluded. It is in this section that
we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and to reveal its detail in a
review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this
different perspective, Cem's actions and memories take on a wholly different
character. We knew all along that there was potential for consequences, but Cem
never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up, and
resentment grows when it is ignored. All experience is particular, and we must
all be aware that individual perspectives are nothing more than that,
individual. It is the consequences that are shared.
But Orhan Pamuk’s The Red
Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers,
visiting the bar in Őngőren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories
are examined from different viewpoints. Oedipus, a man condemned to murder his
father and marry his mother, is one. A perspective the well diggers explore is
that Oedipus is not aware of the curse that directs his life, and that even
when he consciously tries to avoid it shackles, the power of fate further
condemns him to its confines. The second story, from the Shahmaneh, features
Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father
kill his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, fate, the paternal,
maternal and filial, and then eventually powerlessness that form an
intellectual backbone in the work. Cem the property developer is set to
modernize the place that did so much to influence his personality, his outlook
on life and his future. But the place will reassert itself in his life in a
different, wholly unpredicted way that Cem, himself, created, but can neither
influence nor control. The patricide and the filicide of the stories that
obsessed Cem in his youth eventually fight it out in this brilliant book.
The Red Haired Woman, this
short, accessible and apparently simple novel thus develops intellectual and
philosophical dimensions, blended with its constant undercurrent of political
identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader become fully
aware of the complexity of its themes, and how expertly Orhan Pamuk blends
these apparently disparate ideas into a biographical whole called Cem, the
principal character through which we experience an entire view of the world.
And yet the reading of this book, start to finish, is always simple. The style
is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is both personal and
general, mundane and ontological, reassuringly simple and yet emotionally
tangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is it the
heart of the complex. Or was that the other way around?
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