Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely

This is a brave novel. Freely, the translator of Orhan Pamuk and a writer with many links to Turkey, does not restrain her highly critical account of its modern history and culture, seen chiefly through the eyes of a naive young American. This heroine has much in common with the young Freely, who grew up in Turkey; her background knowledge and credentials are impeccable.

Arriving to study in Istanbul in the late 1960s, Jeannie Wakefield becomes involved with a mysterious group of young people, some of them part of a Communist cell hunted by government officials. Jeannie tiptoes through a minefield: who is genuine, and who is playing a double, even treble, game? Her own father, possibly a CIA spy, is manipulating his daughter and may be turning her into an informant. Falling in love with one of the group, she loses all ability to distance herself from this deadly web.

Jeannie may be the cause of a horrific murder when the group turns on a suspected spy, cuts his body to pieces and conceals it in a trunk (with echoes of the Ottoman assassinations of the Topkapi, where murders were carried out in secret and bodies thrown into the Bosphorus). In Atatürk's republic, the state-within-a-state is still fully operational. The story continues to modern times and shows corruption flourishing: the 1999 earthquake exposes the jerry-building tolerated in spite of the immense risk to human life.

Even return to the US does not save Jeannie from her fate, for she is inextricably involved, to the point where she goes back to Turkey and has a child by her lover. From now on, however, her loyalties are re-appraised. The child will come first, although she is still at the epicentre of danger in a state where cruelty and death are commonplace expectations for anyone who runs foul of officialdom. Convincing awareness of these realities underlies this work of fiction. Jeannie's disappearance, possibly involving "extraordinary rendition" because it would suit all parties to silence her, chills the blood. The Americans, it turns out, are almost as culpable as the Turks, equally ready to betray and murder.

The narrative unfolds in an appropriately complex Byzantine manner, with extracts from Jeannie's writings wrapped up in the story supplied by another member of the group. I found her style rather unconvincing: she is supposed to have become a journalist, but lacks the self-editing one would expect. The book spins its web in and out, back and forth, and could itself have done with some tightening and cutting.

Nevertheless, Enlightenment is both a gripping novel and a powerful fictional version of the argument that Turkey does not yet subscribe to the levels of democracy and human rights required if EU membership is to mean more than a passport to economic improvement.

Interesting? Click here to explore further