A friend once confessed the frustration of setting a story in Istanbul, a city where not even the past stands still. The place you think you should start is never the place you actually start – and umpteen drafts later you find yourself starting from somewhere different again. And so it proved the case when I set out to write my novel, The Adventure of the Second Wife. It takes place partly among the arcane world of Sherlock Holmes devotees but also in different eras of Istanbul. At one point, my narrator admits the challenge:
“I would say that to understand this story you also have to understand Istanbul, but I am not convinced such a thing is possible. I do not pretend the city is Eastern and inscrutable. In many ways it is friendly and familiar. But it is devious, like the pub raconteur who, while you work out if he is spinning a tale, has you buy him another round. On each visit, I felt I had come to a different place. It was like watching a time-lapse kaleidoscope of urban sprawl. Istanbul is a city where things change with a whir, and where standing still feels like falling through air.”
How do you depict a city whose population has grown, from one to sixteen million in my lifetime, where a chance archaeological discovery of a bizarre set of footprints buried in the tar beneath the Byzantine harbour, added another five thousand years to its history? Those who know the city are perpetually haunted by the memory of what used to be and what used to be there before that.
Coming to terms with this enigmatic quality has been a gauntlet numerous western accounts have tried to pick up. Bookseller Hugh Grant advises Julia Roberts in the film Notting Hill to read Istanbul, the Imperial City, by John Freely as one of the few travel books where the author had actually been to the place he described. Of course, to say that Freely, a prolific chronicler of the city, had been to Istanbul is a bit like saying James Joyce had been to Dublin or Damon Runyon to New York. Words can be as much a part of the skyline as domes and minarets.
For some writers Istanbul is a symbol, an exotic setting, a world other than their own. Voltaire’s Candide learns to cultivate his garden there, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando changes sex and social class there. AS Byatt’s middle-aged narratologist Gillian Perholt finds a genie in a bottle and much excitement in Istanbul’s dusty covered bazaar. And lest we forget Dashiell Hammett’s band of rogues travel to Istanbul (aka Constantinople) to birdnap the Maltese Falcon.
James Bond speaks for a whole genre of Istanbul noir, when in From Russia with Love, he finds himself “in a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.” Not surprisingly on his flight from London, Bond is reading The Masque of Demitrios- another dark yarn set in an Istanbul where its author, Eric Ambler, had never ever set foot.
Istanbul is very much the home of Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk. He writes of a city wreathed in a grey and melancholic longing- the Turkish word he uses is hüzun. However, even he confessed that many readers find this description all but incomprehensible and that for newer generations, Istanbul is a vibrant, colourful metropolis.
One of the most famous literary descriptions of the city to Turkish readers is a line in the 1902 poem “Fog” by Tevik Fikret – banned at the time for the sense of both freedom and tyranny it evokes- “Exhausted a thousand husbands, yet still a virgin,” is one translation. Suffice it to say that a city famous for its conquest by the Ottoman armies in 1453 is seen as having a way of outsmarting those who would possess it, of conquering its would be conquerors, of having an identity no single author can subdue.
I have seen an advance copy of Istanbul in the European Literary Imagination. 1547-2024. Books and Manuscripts from the Ömer Koç collection, compiled by Sven Becker. It begins in 1547 with a factual poem based on an actual visit written by the jurist, Jean Boiceau de La Borderie and wends its way past WB Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” aboard Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. The Adventure of the Second Wife is the 298th and final entry. I am pleased but under no illusions. There are many more Istanbuls to come. The canon can never be complete.
