Review of The Crescent Moon Fox, by Metin Murat, pub. Armida Publications 2022

“It was the first time that Zeki was seeing Cypriots as Cypriots – for once they were neither Greek nor Turkish. Here they were one people. Here on the ship he saw people sharing food – even if it was just a hard-boiled egg or a tomato – talking, playing cards and backgammon. Why do we have to be away from our island to be one people he asked himself?”

What constitutes identity? This is a question that concerns this novel throughout. Set mostly in Cyprus, over a period from 1933 to 2007, it tells the story of the British withdrawal from the island and the subsequent strife between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Zeki Aziz, from a Turkish village, is a promising student who wins sponsorship to study at the LSE. At first he sees England very much from an outsider perspective (and quite amusingly, for though this is a novel about deadly serious matters it is leavened with humour):

“The couches and oversized armchairs were upholstered in a deep burgundy-coloured leather that was stitched into patterns that seemed to resemble a series of fat bellies and dimples. The tables in the room were made of wood but not of a type he had ever seen. The wood was highly polished and looked as if it might be very old – which he thought was a shame for a house which otherwise gave signs of belonging to someone so rich.”

But by the time he returns, not altogether willingly, to Cyprus, he is very much betwixt and between two cultures and seeing both as a partial outsider. Ironically the same is happening in reverse to Major Gamble, a British diplomat in Cyprus who had helped to finance Zeki’s studies and who now finds himself faced, post-independence, with going “home” to a country with which he no longer identifies:

“But where and what was home now? The truth was that he no longer recognised the place that Britain was becoming. Everyone around him seemed to be getting younger. And on every street corner you could hear that awful noise that they referred to as ‘pop’ music. As he made his way along the coastal road, past Boğaz, he thought to himself that he had spent so much time away from England, perhaps he should stay on in Cyprus after all.”

Meanwhile Zeki’s childhood friend Aydin is finding that some aspects of identity can trump the geographical and political. There are in fact several individual instances in this novel of Greek and Turk forming relationships. But over and over, when it really matters, people revert to tribal groupings, as Zeki notices when he becomes a representative in the new parliament:

“His fellow representatives were waiting in the courtyard taking refuge from the heat by standing in the shade of the orange trees. He looked at these groups of men clustered together by the trees and realised that not a single group was mixed. Greek stayed with Greek. Turk stayed with Turk.”

I found this novel quite a page-turner; it never loses itself in “issues” so as to forget that novels are essentially about people, and the lure of “what happens next” to the various characters in whom the reader has become interested is strong. So I don’t want to go too much into plot details. But one thing I really like is the novel’s refusal to provide glib solutions to the problems it raises. People become personally close to individuals of the other community, yet this does not change their attitude to “the other” in general, nor prevent them from participating in atrocities against them.

The writing is subtle and delicate. When Zeki, during his time in London, visits Paris, he is excited at “visiting, for the first time, a properly foreign country”. This points up very economically what has become apparent: that of the various solutions for Cyprus, the only one neither side really wanted was the one they got, namely independence. The Greeks wanted enosis, ie union with Greece, the Turks, being heavily outnumbered, wanted the British to stay and protect them, and to Zeki, Britain has never been a “properly foreign country”. When, back home, he meets Aydin again after several years, he is taken aback when Aydin, who in the meantime has come under some Greek influence, looks forward to the British departure; “Can you believe it? No more British büyük efendis to lord it over us.” Later in Zeki’s village, when he is greeted with “Zeki, lad, hoşgeldiniz, my you look like a real büyük efendi.!” we do not really need the glossary at the end to know what is going on.

I suppose we must come to the fox of the title. It is real, but also a sort of symbolic protector of the village, in which role it didn’t really do a lot for me, other than give the book a quirky title. I would rather end by quoting another instance of writerly subtlety. Here, Zeki is on the point of leaving Cyprus for the LSE. The sense of belonging that comes over him in this passage is powerful, but the reader should not overlook the first sentence of the paragraph.

“Zeki did not go home. He turned instead and took the path that led up to the hill behind the village. When he reached its brow he breathed more easily and stopped to look around him. This was his land, he said, as if to reassure himself. In front of him he had the sea, perfectly blue, and the rocky shoreline that disappeared into the distance, virgin land as far as the eye could see. He turned and took the track that led towards Avrigadou. He walked slowly, taking his time to follow with his eye the flight of different birds; looking to see which of the shepherds were out in the hills with their flock. He saw goats standing up against a carob tree chewing at the pods that were blackening in the sun.
Across the sea he could make out the coast of Turkey, and he stared at the pale outline of its mountains. Then he heard some stones falling down the hill from the ridge above him, almost as if someone or something had lost their footing. He called out. No one answered. For a moment, for an eternity, the landscape seemed quite silent as if some higher force had called for quiet. He had the distinct impression that someone or something was observing him. He called out again. Nothing. He could no longer hear the cicadas which a few moments before had been deafening the hills. He was all alone, but not alone, for an overwhelming sense of peace took hold of him. He knew that he was from and of this piece of earth.”

Review of Notes On Water by Amanda Dalton, pub. Smith/Doorstop Books 2022

Everything is river and the river is more than itself

This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first.

I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building.

The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient:

I think I am in the river Cocytus,
or maybe this is just black water
running underneath an urban street.

In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death:

In just seven weeks he goes
from coffee and wine
to peppermint tea
to tiny fruits
to water
on a spoon

and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him:

Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
and broken. Everything is wet.

This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.

The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.

Review of The Bones of Barry Knight, by Emma Musty, pub. Legend Press 2022

This is a multi-narrator novel in which the various speakers are all converging on one point, a refugee camp. Seven-year-old Saleema lives there; Amanda works for a charity partly responsible for its running; ageing rock star Barry is hoping to resurrect his career via a well-publicised visit there; journalist Ana is pursuing an investigation into both him and the charity, while Sol and Omar have connections with people already there and are going for their own personal reasons.

All the narrators are believable; some, inevitably, are more engaging than others – Saleema, the lively, curious child, especially so. She and her friend Noor have aged prematurely and known too much tragedy, but they are still children:

“even though it is too hot to do this and we are nearly too old for such childish things, suddenly the very feeling of running is everything. My body wakes up as we take a corner too tight and have to jump a tent peg, leaving adults shouting in our wake. ‘Where are we going?’ I scream after her and she briefly turns to me and then starts laughing as she runs, like it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said, or she’s ever heard. ‘Are you crazy? We’re not going anywhere! We’re just running because we can!’ And then I start laughing too, because of course we’re not going anywhere and because the running feels good and then we collapse in the shade of the big tent for the kids with no parents, but round the side, where no one else can see us. I can hear my mother’s voice; she’s telling one of them off for making a mess, and I can tell from the tone of her voice that she doesn’t love them more [than me]. For a moment, everything feels lighter.”

Amanda, troubled by the impossibility of keeping clean hands in a situation where helping people also involves turning a blind eye to bribery and corruption, has developed a cynical edge that individualises her voice:

“the governments think that the camps should be worse, potentially with no toilets at all, so they don’t create a pull factor, as if having an adequate number of toilets will bring thousands running – ‘Have you heard, in the camp a little further north they have loads of toilets!’ ‘Praise be to God, we must leave everything and go there now!’”

And Barry, who for most of the book has little enough to recommend him as a human being, nevertheless has a degree of self-awareness and sense of humour that render him rather more likeable than one might expect, particularly when he gets to the camp and shows more sense of fitness than the staff:

“She says we’ll start with a little tour, like we’re in some sort of bloody theme park or on safari. I almost make a joke about looking forward to seeing the hippos, but I stop myself, and congratulate myself a little for doing so.”

Sol and Omar I found slightly less engaging than the others; Amanda’s acid description of Omar as “righteous” is on the money, and though phrases like “How can any of us move forward without first examining our past, understanding our present and looking towards making our future a better place?” are believable from him, they do not endear him to a reader. By and large, the multi-narrator strategy does not create undue problems in keeping up with the story; we always know more or less where we are. Now and then, one comes on a name or detail mentioned earlier and thinks “who or what was that?” – but that is what second readings are for.

Tension builds up gradually through the novel, until everyone arrives at the camp, when both the speed and tension of the narrative really take off. The ending, even though it is foreshadowed in the prologue, and hinted at in later chapters, is still capable of surprising a reader; I think because these characters have all become quite well known to us, and unlike Saleema we have not needed to absorb the fundamental truth she voices when remembering her father:

“I remember how it felt when he smiled at me with his hope all over his face and I knew I didn’t have to worry about anything and that he would keep me safe. And then they took him away and put him in prison, and then they killed him, and then he was dead, and that is how sudden life is, and how sudden death is.”

This is very much a novel about contemporary political issues, specifically what sometimes gets called the “refugee crisis”, which appears in novels less often than one might expect. But fortunately, it revolves around believable people, without whom no issues can long engage a reader. The writing is assured and has that credibility which convinces one that the writer knows her subject matter well.