The Week In Books: Their name is read - Turkey in full colour

It seems just a trifle unfair that Orhan Pamuk, Nobel literature laureate and the most globally succesful Turkish author in an age, should also enjoy the best view in two continents. Across two continents, to be exact. Look out over the waters from his writing flat in Cihangir, on the Galata bank of the Golden Horn in Istanbul, and the domes and minarets of Sultanahmet (in Europe) rise above the trees on one side. On the other, over the Bosphorus where the ferries Pamuk loves forever chug from shore to shore, the Asian suburbs hover in a late-summer haze. Piling on the symbolic detail, the local mosque stands just below, with ugly high-as-houses cruise liners ("really bad ships", Pamuk snorts) tied up at a nearby quay.

As great writers have argued for centuries, Istanbul (which everywhere harbours traces of its ancestors, Constantinople and Byzantium) more or less contains the world. For Pamuk, the city he writes about with such warmth and depth has always been a multicultural model, "so many layers of history, so much ethnic multiplicity". Next week, the Frankfurt Book Fair will host Turkey as its "country of honour", with 300 writers, an opening address by Pamuk himself, and a programme that embraces art and music ready to roll.

For once, as I learned during a visit last month, Turkish authors hope that that their true – and mixed – colours will be witnessed by the world. "Now we are seen as this 'moderate Muslim country'," says Müge Sokem, a fearless (and much-prosecuted) publisher, and committee chair for the Frankfurt programme. "But that is not us. I'm living in this country not as a 'moderate Islamic' person but as a hybrid."

Turkish artists and thinkers have to navigate between two sets of rocks. On one side lurks an aggressively secular state, with its military and judicial arms. In recent years, it has subjected Pamuk and scores of other creators to often frivolous but still draining court cases for "insulting" some aspect of "Turkish identity". On the other looms the soft-Islamic agenda of the AKP government, with its thumping majority. For all the doubts about its long-term aims, the government has backed the Turkish Publishers' Association in its push to make Frankfurt a celebration of diverse shades of faith and culture.

"When I started writing in 1975," recalls Pamuk, "Turkish cultural existence in the world arena was zero. At least it's not zero any more" – thanks in good part to him. Yet authors still fret under the burden of having their work defined solely according to its stance on religion and nationalism.

Novelist Elif Shafak weathered an "Article 301" ordeal when her sympathetic treatment of Turkish Armenian history in The Bastard of Istanbul fell foul of the legal chauvinists. Yet, as we talk on a hotel roof-terrace with the Sea of Marmara sparkling beyond, she shows me her new bestseller – Black Milk. It's a darkly comic literary memoir of post-natal depression, which has drawn a huge response from women readers. "For me, the primary thing is art," she insists. "It's literature; it's imagination. It's not about identity politics."

For all this city's raucous literary debate, Turkish writers don't want always to have to strike a pose about Armenian massacres, students in headscarves or over-mighty generals. They do long to show their varied cultural colours to the world. Take novelist and dramatist Murathan Mungan, a true Istanbulli: Kurdish granny; Arab grandpa; Bosnian mother from Sarajevo. In the late 1970s, he became the first "out" author in modern Turkey – although he spurns the "gay literature" label too. "Authors are the tongues of their nation," he says, "but we want to address the world." He and others hope the Frankfurt stage will let them do that.

South of the Nobel laureate's balcony, the sun glints off Aghia Sophia: a great Byzantine cathedral, then Ottoman mosque, then Atatürk-era museum. Pamuk sighs happily. "How could you not be an optimist with this view?"

P.S.In the midst of modern conflicts, critics have often asked: "Where are the war poets?" Perhaps we'll shortly need to refresh that demand: "Where are the credit-crisis novelists?" Current turmoil aside, most British fiction in its blinkered, reality-denying way has failed utterly to capture the social dynamism of high finance and its far-reaching intrusion into contemporary lives. How sadly symptomatic that James Buchan, a stylish and accessible writer about the City and its mysteries as well as a talented novelist, should have retreated – however charmingly – into the country-house ghost story with his latest book, The Gate of Air. At this rate, we shall have to wait until Andrew Davies's TV adaptation of Dickens's Little Dorrit next month to enjoy the downfall of a master of the universe – that well-respected banker, Mr Merdle.