The Literature of Paranoia

Living in Turkey has made Orhan Pamuk a master of the genre.

- Judith Shulevitz

Orhan Pamuk's new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a "fairy-tale," "otherworldly," and fictional Ottoman island-a "pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea," or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm of empire at the point of collapse. In 1901, a bubonic plague breaks out. Pamuk will use it to expose the infirmities of this body politic.

Back in Istanbul, the sultan dispatches his top public-health official, the Royal Chemist, who happens to be a quarantine expert. The Royal Chemist is promptly murdered. The sultan sends out a second doctor, Nuri Bey, to solve the crime and try again to contain the plague. But all sanitary measures must go through Mingheria's Ottoman governor, Sami Pasha, a genial host and an irrepressible stonewaller, political to his core. Nuri Bey has recently married the sultan's niece Princess Pakize, so when the royal couple arrive, Governor Sami Pasha gathers a crowd for a suitable welcome ceremony, contagion be damned.

The plague doesn't worry Sami Pasha; he considers the rumors a scheme to heighten tensions between the island's rival groups, the Greeks and the Turks. He's not interested in a scientific approach to the murder, either; he will just drum up 20 murder suspects to throw into jail. As he tells Nuri Bey, "Even that which may appear at first to have nothing at all to do with politics may reveal beneath the surface all manner of plots and nefarious intentions."