Nights of Plague is historical fiction, but no one in it is claiming to own the historical truth. The imaginary Mina makes use of these imaginary sources and of her own imagination. Besides, many of the story’s participants have written their memoirs.

The Chief Scrutineer is the most powerful of government officers and when his files come into the possession of Pakize and Nuri, they demonstrate how omnipresent his agents have been. Mingheria is full of informers and spies. The novel we are reading, so we are informed in a preface, is written by Mina in 2017, drawing on Pakize’s letters and other contradictory sources. But no, Pamuk is doing something more complicated. Those letters, you may suppose, will constitute the narrative. To take his place, the Sultan’s niece Princess Pakize and her epidemiologist husband, Dr Nuri, arrive Nuri is to take charge of quarantine, Pakize to write long letters to her sister. The Sultan’s Royal Chemist has been dispatched from Istanbul to take charge. The first cases of plague have been hushed up. The governor is the easy-going Sami Pasha, whose career as a colonial official has been disappointing and of whom readers are likely, despite his occasional cruelty, to become rather fond. The population is divided roughly equally between Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians. Mingheria is a fictional island, lying somewhere between Crete and Cyprus and sharing aspects of both islands’ history. We know it was a banner initially designed to advertise rose-scented hand cream. The child believes the major was holding a national flag stitched by patriotic village girls. We know there were a measly few – most of the major’s intended audience having been deterred by terror of catching bubonic plague. She thinks there were thousands of people assembled beneath the balcony. What young Mina has been taught, though, deviates from what we readers know. She has visited the museum devoted to the Heroic Commander. There are trinket shops full of souvenirs based on those images. She has seen pictures – all, remarks the narrator sardonically, “clearly influenced by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People’”. The child has learned in primary school about her nation’s birth. Long live the Mingherian nation, long live liberty!”įifty-eight years later, a little girl repeats those words to her great-grandmother. Blood is spurting from a bullet wound in his arm but, undaunted, he cries out to the crowd assembled beneath him: “From this moment on, our land is free. In 1901, a man in a major’s uniform agleam with medals steps on to the balcony of a government building and brandishes a flag.

New book orhan pamuk