Ottoman Istanbul brought to life

Among the novels I have most enjoyed have been those that evoked a culture, a way of life that has passed into history, a world that is alien to us in the modern West. One outstanding example is Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino, set in the Caucasus before and during the Russian revolution. Like Ali and Nino, Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree is set at a time of turmoil when older, oriental traditions and values are being challenged by new, modern, western ways. Set in Istanbul in the 1830s, it marvellously and convincingly depicts the sights, sounds and smells of the imperial city, from the secret world of the Sultan’s harem to the markets, coffee houses, baths and teeming, bustling streets. From the perfumed maze of the harem, to the foul-smelling tanneries, from the formidable Sultan’s mother, to the transvestite dancers-come-prostitutes of the seedy underbelly of the city, this is an expertly drawn picture of a bygone era.

Goodwin portrays the clash of civilisations, between the old world of the janissaries, the once feared shock troops of the Ottomans, and the new world of western, uniformed soldiers, drilling with booted feet, marching in line. The rich oriental world, with its fabulous colour, its exotic smells, its once glorious triumphs, doomed to failure by the march of modernity against which it can no longer compete.

The novel is more than anything a vehicle for Goodwin, an accomplished historian of the Ottoman Empire and travel writer, to portray the history of the Empire in a different form. The book is an illustration of how fiction can be a particularly powerful means of presenting history, of which Ivo Andrićs masterly The Bridge on the Drina is such a fine example. As a portrayal of Ottoman Istanbul, and of a difficult period in its history, this is a wonderful book.

As a novel, it is not entirely satisfying. The idea of a murder mystery in 1830s Istanbul is wonderful, and the choice of the well-connected, well-informed and well-educated eunuch, Yashim, as the main character, the investigator who unravels the plot, was inspired. However, as a character Yashim is never fully developed, beyond a suppressed anger at his neutered state. A more skilled novelist would have done better, which is why this book does not approach the heights of The Bridge on the Drina. And the denouement is rather rushed, the different strands of the plot not fully drawn together.

But despite those reservations, it is a wonderful, rich and delicious evocation of a world that is no more, a world entirely alien, almost as much, I suspect, to the inhabitants of today’s Istanbul as to a reader in Western Europe. In the West, in Britain or France say, one has a sense of continuity, that the world we live in is the direct descendent of the worlds of our forebears in the nineteenth, eighteenth of seventeenth centuries; that we came from them. But in Turkey, there was a break, or at least a succession of breaks, as modernising Sultans, and finally Ataturk, determinedly tore up the traditions of the past, stamped them out and replaced them with something different, imported. It is hard from our modern perspective even to imagine, let alone grasp that vanished world. The monuments to that age, above all the Topkapı Palace, give us at best a glimpse. Wandering through the gilded rooms of the harem, one can marvel, but not know the world that once existed there. It is so foreign to us as to be incomprehensible. Yet I think Goodwin has done as good a job as is possible of reawakening, in the pages of his novel, the bygone world of the Ottomans.