Luis de Bernieres’s Birds Without Wings is definitely one of the finest novels I have read in the last decade. It is a masterpiece. This is a beautifully written epic story about the tragic drama and historical events that stormed Anatolia and Greece by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also the story of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his rise to fame and power. But most of all it is the story of ordinary human beings: Turks, Greeks and Armenians who lived and worked together, befriended; fell in love; quarreled; hated and killed each other.
The novel alternates between chapters, some are purely fictional, but with a historically accurate and well researched background, and others are purely a concise and objective narration of the life and deeds of Mustafa Kemal and other historical figures from Turkey and Greece.
This story of human suffering is deep and touching. Time and again had authors written on how politics, nationalism, and wars tear societies apart, and how grand and noble notions and beliefs end up inflicting great miseries on the simple and down trodden, however, this novel stands among the very best. I do not hesitate to rank it en par with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
The telling of grand historical events that shaped modern day Turkey and Greece are not the sole reason for my consideration of this epic novel as a great masterpiece, but also the fascinating lives of its fictional protagonists: more than ten principal characters and almost twenty secondary figures. By telling their interrelated and interwoven stories the reader is not only dazzled by the emotional intensity and human capability for conflicting and even contradicting sentiments and behavior, but is also humbled by the realization of how little understanding of the true nature of things we do actually have, and the false presumptions and prejudices that drive our lives. According to Iskander the potter, Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrows. This sentence of wisdom captures the essence of the novel. All characters hope of fulfilling their dreams, but just like birds without wings, they fail to attain what they are wishing for, and unlike birds, Bernieres’s characers are full of sorrows.
Philothei is a beautiful Greek girl who loves Ibrahim, a Turkish boy. Different religious affiliations notwithstanding, they are engaged and both families bless their planned marriage. But war interferes and harshly shatters their beautiful story.
Rustom Bey is the notable of the village – a man with noble albeit contradictory motivations. He yearns for true love but never attains it. He is shocked by discovering his wife with a lover, murders her lover and drags her to the town square where the mob starts stoning her before the imam interferes and rescues her. She ends up in a brothel, but eventually they find it in their hearts to forgive each other. He looks for love elsewhere - he purchases a Circassian concubine, who is neither Circassian nor a concubine, yet she gives him a partial taste of how it is to have his love requited.
The deep friendship between Karatavuk, the son of Iskander the potter, and Mehmetchik the brother of Philothei on one hand, and that between the Greek orthodox priest and the Muslim imam on the other hand tells a lot about how the inhabitants of this small village had seamlessly transcended all ethnic and religious divides. However, on an ominous level, the novel warns us the it is amazingly easy for communities to forget centuries of harmonious coexistence and spiral down towards sectarian and ethnic animosity. One of the minor characters, the Greek school teacher is presented throughout the novel as a horrible evil fanatic, yet even he is redeemed at a late stage of the novel, thus emphasizing the core concept of this novel: nobody is basically bad or good, we are all humans, and we all have strains of the good and the bad in us.
