The timelessness of ancient myths and legends, and their echoes across culture, time and age, runs through Orhan Pamuk’s compelling new novel The Red-Haired Woman, a modern reworking of two famous tragedies — the Greek legend of Oedipus and the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rostam.

In both tales, the son is brought up far away from his father and when they do meet, the two do not recognise each other. In an interesting twist, the two tales mirror each other, or rather, create images in reverse: in the former the son kills his father; in the latter, the father kills his son. Different versions of both tales, ranging from theatrical productions to illustrated Persian manuscripts and the writings of Sigmund Freud, permeate Pamuk’s stunning novel as each interpretation is explored, examined and commented upon throughout by the protagonist Cem, a building contractor and once a would-be writer.

Cem’s fascination with the Oedipus/Sohrab-Rostam theme is directly related to his own life, but the novel’s astonishing and unexpected denouement gives Cem’s tale an entirely new perspective, casting extraordinary mirror-like innuendoes and double entendres into the text. The novel also weaves in modern Turkey’s political upheavals, including the growth of state authoritarianism and the dire fate of left wing political activists and dissidents.

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel is a profound contemplation on human frailty, politics and changing cultures

Cem grows up with the awareness that his Marxist father, owner of a pharmacy in Istanbul, is often visited by political friends and that he has been taken away by soldiers and tortured more than once. But Cem is also aware that there are other mysterious reasons for his good-looking father’s ‘disappearances’ that cause his parents to quarrel: he suspects his father has mistresses. In 1984, Cem’s father abandons his wife and teenage son altogether. Money runs short. However, Cem’s mother is determined that he should join a good university. To pay the fees for a good cram school, he begins working at a nearby bookstore where the owner nurtures Cem’s love of books and his dreams of becoming a writer.

Mother and son then move away from Istanbul to Gebze where they live with a relative who provides Cem with a better paying job guarding orchards, but Cem is more interested in the work of a nearby well-digger, Master Mahmut, and joins him on his next project as an apprentice. As he comes to regard Master Mahmut as a surrogate father, the two live in a tent on-site on a deserted stretch of land that belongs to Master Mahmut’s client. All day they dig deeper and deeper, on a spot identified by Master Mahmut, in the hopes of finding water. In the evenings, master and apprentice stroll to the nearby garrison town of Ongoren where, on his very first day, Cem is enraptured by a tall, beautiful red-haired woman — he believes she glanced at him as if there were something very special about him.

On subsequent trips to Ongoren, Cem makes it a point to slip away from Master Mahmut to catch a glimpse of the Red-Haired Woman whenever he can. He begins to spy on her. She belongs to a travelling theatrical troupe, the Theatre of Morality, which is performing in Ongoren. The fact that Master Mahmut disapproves of the theatre and will not allow Cem to go there piques the boy’s curiosity further and he begins to visit the Theatre of Morality secretly.

Watching a performance of the final battle between Sohrab and Rustom, he is spellbound by the Red-Haired Woman’s performance as the dead Sohrab’s weeping mother. His infatuation with her and a subsequent encounter between the two leads to consequences he could not have foreseen, and is followed the next day by Cem’s shocking betrayal of Master Mahmut, for which Cem cannot forgive himself.

The narrative is permeated with Cem’s awareness of other literary texts, including those of Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dante, as metaphor for his own predicaments or perceptions. The fact that the 17-year-old Cem has not heard of the Sohrab and Rostam legend before he sees the play in Ongoren, but is already acquainted with the Greek legend of Oedipus, is a telling comment on the prevalence of Western literary forms in modern Turkey and the marginalisation of the traditional: the revival of the latter is central to the mission of the Red-Haired Woman and her theatrical troupe. Thus, the theme of absent fathers and fatherless sons also becomes a comment on Turkey’s cultural heritage, past and present.

Cem’s next encounter with the Sohrab and Rostam tale takes place 20 years after the incidents at Ongoren during a business trip to Iran, where he discovers that it is Iran’s “national epic.” He also sees it in an illustrated copy of the Shahnameh. By then, inspired by his association with Master Mahmut, Cem has graduated from university as a geological engineer and joined a construction firm. He continues to be haunted by memories of Master Mahmut although he never speaks of him or the Red-Haired Woman, or his sojourn in Ongoren, even to his wife, Ayse and this secret festers and gnaws away at him.

Cem and Ayse’s great sorrow is that they are childless. Cem encourages Ayse to move beyond her sense of loss by joining him on his quest to unearth different versions of the Sohrab and Rostam story, which takes them across the world from the museums of Iran and Turkey, to Europe and America. All this while, thanks to their contacts with municipal officials and in the ruling political party, Ayse and Cem, without a thought to the ethics of insider trading, judiciously buy land and property demarcated for future development and become very rich. They set up their own company, symbolically named Sohrab, which grows rapidly: there is a building boom in Istanbul, a city that has expanded so fast that it has absorbed Ongoren and the deserted area where Cem once dug a well. This leads to a situation that takes Cem and Ayse’s company, Sohrab, to that very place where Cem first saw the Red-Haired Woman and where Cem is forced to confront his past, and that of his father and surrogate father and the future that all them have forged.

This lucid, riveting and multi-layered novel is divided into three parts. The first two focus on Cem’s perspective. The third gives a voice to the Red-Haired Woman and through her it moves the narrative beyond the patriarchal preoccupation with fathers and sons, to the matriarchal tale of mothers and wives. It is a fine novel and a profound contemplation of human needs, frailties and aspirations, and the relationships of all these with literature, culture, history and changing times.

The reviewer is the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English

The Red-Haired Woman
By Orhan Pamuk
Hamish Hamilton, India
ISBN: 978-0670089260
253pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 17th, 2017