Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize winner.(Literature)

AFTER BEING RUMOURED to be a front runner, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. At fifty-four he is relatively young for such a distinction. While a productive if not a prolific author, he won recognition and popularity in his own country in the 1980s, then rapidly built up an international reputation with the translation of his later novels, five appearing in English (with Faber) from the 1990s.

The Nobel award was quickly politicised by commentators. It was seen as recognition of a freedom fighter from a country with a poor human rights record. This is ironic. Until recently Pamuk stood apart from politics, both in his work, though it may be indirectly political, and as a spokesman outside it. At the Adelaide Festival of 1992, Helen Garner recalls him talking about "the engaged Turkish writer who bravely goes to jail--by comparison I seem to be a spoilt young bourgeois [he was forty-two] who has fun and writes a lot ..." Garner goes on to add: "a tight lipped audience contemplated the young Turk's playful cynicism, but I couldn't help laughing ..." Since then Pamuk--like Garner--has moved on to sterner stuff.

Behind the apparent cynicism Pamuk may have been claiming a freedom to go his own way as a writer, to be "politically incorrect", differing not only from committed contemporaries but also from such distinguished predecessors as Yashar Kemal and Nazim Hikmet, writers "of the people" who took up public causes and went to jail. In his latest book of memoirs, Pamuk speaks of a calculated detachment, reminiscent of his admired James Joyce, describing his alienated youth in his beloved native Istanbul as member of a privileged Westernised class for whom an artistic career was discouraged. Why Pamuk recently chose to speak out politically, attracting international attention, is not clear. Perhaps it was because of his disappointment with the present regime, his feeling that as a public figure he could no longer stand aside.

In 2006 the Turkish government threatened Pamuk with prosecution, subsequently withdrawn, for insulting the Turkish nation. He had criticised it for not admitting to the killing of thousands of Kurds and Armenians during the later Ottoman rule which preceded republican independence. It would be regrettable if Pamuk's comments and the ensuing political controversy should overshadow his undoubted literary achievement, as happened in some reports of the Nobel award. This would only harden the repressive attitudes of the present Islamic-leaning government, while at the same time reinforcing what may be seen as a European bias against Turkey, the legacy of the myth of "the barbarous Turk", part of a discriminatory orientalism that may be seen as currently hampering Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. Of course there are human rights issues involved too.

While the support of noted writers for public causes can be valuable and admirable, writers' distinctive contributions are made through their work, not outside it, as authors as different as David Malouf and Frank Moorhouse have argued. Those wishing to understand contemporary Turkey--and I have found that there is a lack of knowledge in Australia about Turkey, past and present--will learn more about it from reading Pamuk's work than by following the political debate the Nobel Prize has whipped up.

Pamuk has rarely left his home city of Istanbul, his favourite fictional setting. He writes in a study overlooking the Bosphorus, the winding waterway dividing Europe and Asia. Fittingly, division and ambivalence, cultural and psychological, are his major concern. In revolving questions about cultural inheritance and influence, and the underlying contradictions of human nature, Pamuk understands in depth that, in Saul Bellow's words, "nothing goes unmingled". He has taken advantage of twentieth-century experimental writing, of modernism and postmodernism, to treat the complex fate of being Turkish with a wit and allusiveness that can be challenging and mischievous, not eschewing realism but lacing it with nuance and resonance. For all his writerly playfulness his novels are grounded in the psychology of self-division and in realities of time and place. All his work has historical reverberations.

And while his novels have become demandingly complex, even convoluted, their narrative propulsion draws on conventions of the murder ...