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. He looked at these groups of men clustered together by the trees and realised that not a single group was mixed. “His fellow representatives were waiting in the courtyard taking refuge from the heat by standing in the shade of the orange trees. 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: There are in fact several individual instances in this novel of Greek and Turk forming relationships. Meanwhile Zeki’s childhood friend Aydin is finding that some aspects of identity can trump the geographical and political. 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.” And on every street corner you could hear that awful noise that they referred to as ‘pop’ music. Everyone around him seemed to be getting younger. “But where and what was home now? The truth was that he no longer recognised the place that Britain was becoming. 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: 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.”īut 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. The tables in the room were made of wood but not of a type he had ever seen. “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. 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): Zeki Aziz, from a Turkish village, is a promising student who wins sponsorship to study at the LSE. 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. What constitutes identity? This is a question that concerns this novel throughout. Why do we have to be away from our island to be one people he asked himself?” 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. “It was the first time that Zeki was seeing Cypriots as Cypriots – for once they were neither Greek nor Turkish.
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