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7/23/10
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Books Sci-fi Istanbul
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Nothing is ever what it seems in a science fiction world. Maria Eliadescollides with The Dervish House Long-term residents of Istanbul know a single day can wreak revolution. Power shuts off for hours or IMF protestors bust bank windows on Istiklal; from the completely mundane to the utterly outrageous – one moment change an entire lifetime. It doesn't take much. Fortuitously, Ian McDonald, exotic locale king, opens his novel of futuristic adventure with a reverberation familiar enough to be plausible. The Dervish House is McDonald's 18th book. As a winner of the Nebula and Hugo Awards among other honours, he has been hailed as one of the greatest writers of contemporary science fiction. His novels focus on non-Western societies and social change with great cultural sensitivity. The Dervish House is no exception. The novel centers around an Eskiköy tekke – the type of misfits and old Istanbulites who are very ‘business as usual’ -that is, their ‘business’ being the search for a better place in the city -when a suicide bomber blows herself up on a Tophane tram. What follows is a stream of mayhem that involves the tekke' s reclusive ex-economist Rüm, robot-genius boy with a heart condition the leader of an underground Islamic group, his nextdoor neighbour, and the antique shop owner-cum-detective. It's difficult to say who or what is most central in the story. Every character is given equal weight and more than a few plot lines, which inevitably converge. The balance is more than a bit unusual, but that's what makes McDonald's story interesting. You watch to see which character crossing will yield another explosion. Often this gives more of a plodding pace to keep up with and so the novel is plagued with the cut-off endings endemic to books like The Da Vinci Code and other thriller fiction, but with the complexity of chasing a large cast of characters. The novel really is a giant hunt for answers, fulfilment and lost love, caught between corporate takeover, greed and modernization.
64 Time Out Istanbul August 2010
Technophantasms However, there are more than enough thrills and innovations in these pages to engage the reader. Advanced “cep teps” (from ‘cep,’ meaning cell phone in Turkish) which are screens that slide over the eyes to display images and information. Contact details and massive files being transferred skin to skin. Insect-sized robots that morph into larger shapes. Rather than being bound to stationary computers, characters in McDonald's world carry them inside their bodies and do not court fears of being taken over by machines that other futuristic dramas tend to tackle. Technology is a release and a tool to be manipulated. On the other
The novel really is a giant hunt for answers, fulfilment and lost love, caught between corporate takeover, greed and modernization hand, religion and faith are still highly questioned aspects of Turkish life, as we see with the shaykh (a Dervish leader who often possesses mystical powers), who emerges after the bombing. McDonald's successful wizardry stares at Turkey's past, and its more weighty taboos and debated topics. History is revealed at last, and the view wavers between being extraordinary and too superficial. Cracks as subtle as the fault lines in the Bosphorus are obvious to an insider. Little details like crediting marzipan lambs to the Greeks and the placement of sweets on a tea saucer, interrupt what is otherwise a thread of reality. Dialogue booms when more than a few characters make raisonneur speeches. Otherwise, McDonald's vision of possibilities describes anyone's version of Istanbul. This twisting, turning part futuristic fantasy, part intuitive prediction satisfies without divulging all its secrets, just like the city. To hear the narrator talk about motion is one
of the best examples of McDonald's prose at work. Dropping on a race on the Bosphorus, for example, we can actually see the action. Adnan Sario¤lu laughs as he spears through the traffic. The Audi leans like a motorbike as he crosses lanes. Cars peel away like the bowwave of a Russian gas tanker. The game is on. Adnan feels the roar build inside him, the roar that never goes away, that is in the kick of the nanotuned gas engine of his streetsweet German car, that wells in him when Ayfle moves against him on those nights he slips home in the dark... but most, in the shriek of gas hurtling down the Blue Line, under the Bosphorus, out into the world of money, that is the deal, every deal, every closing. The roar that never, never stops. In seven minutes he will take O¤uz for five hundred euro and a dozen traffic-cam fines. Tonight he will meet the manager of one of Istanbul’s fattest hedge funds. On Friday he will slap down a briefcase full of notes in front of that piss-eyed
realtor in his hideous shiny little Lidl suit and set the name of Sario¤lu down by the waters of the Bosphorus. It is the game, the only game and the always game. There is always something more than the expected in moments like this where the reader is drawn into the characters’ realities. We are so close that we forget how far the end will be, but this happens only in those moments. That is the shame of this book, which captures so much and succeeds in so many places but neglects to move fast enough. Its saving grace is that the end arrives not with a whimper, but a series of bangs and the whole novel truly gets the feel of what McDonald calls the “Queen of Cities.” As the reader, we are lucky enough to have Istanbul 2027 written by someone who knows how not to create a true Orientalist fantasy. The Dervish House, published by Prometheus Books, is out in major bookstores now.