Book: The Janissary Tree
Apr. 15th, 2010 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI wasn’t sure if I was entirely sold on the gimmick of a detective story set during the Ottoman Empire when I picked this book up though there were a fair few reviews suggesting that The Janissary Tree was certainly worth a read. Alas, in retrospect those reviews seemed to be focused more on the setting which reviewers evidently knew nothing of beforehand which segues nicely into my first problem with this novel: it was somewhat confusing as to who the target audience were meant to be. The foreshadowing, especially at the beginning was so heavy handed that it became more than a little silly and only worked if you didn’t know anything about Ottoman history. I spent the first few pages muttering ‘it’s the janissaries’ after the first cauldron turned up and the narrative seemed to think so too but refused to state it outright till a little further on. There were pregnant pauses and meaningful looks at what was the functional equivalent of tattooing an Atreides hawk onto the forehead of a dead Harkonnen but the way the narrative refused to state the matter outright made it seem like the obvious connection was meant to be a big mystery.
Which brings me to the second issue of the narrative: the use of Turkish terms without explanation which is confusing if the target audience aren’t meant to know anything about the Ottoman Empire. I know that ‘valide’ means ‘mother’ but there’s certainly not enough in context within the narrative to really clue you in on that. And then there are strange uses of terms like ‘köçek’ and ‘karagözi’. From my general knowledge köçekler were specifically youths who presented as male, effeminate male certainly as far as the theatrics went but still distinctly not female and yet the novel never bothers to explain why in this case the term is being used as a synonym for some mixture of female impersonator and transwoman. Nor is the use of ‘karagözi’ explained. I could understand if the reference was to a simple layperson’s understanding of Sufism since the word refers to a stock character in a shadowplay who represents the straightforward public but within the context of the narrative it seems to describe a specific sect which is again not explained. A glossary of terms might have been nice just to explain how certain words were being used in context really.
Coming back to the point of foreshadowing the general plotline was peppered with what appeared to be foreshadowing of a big reveal regarding the trauma of Yashim’s becoming a eunuch. Unfortunately none of that went anywhere and since no further details were forthcoming it started to get old pretty quickly, especially when the main character himself, other characters and even the narrative line were constantly referring to his being a eunuch. I’m not sure if this constant reiteration of the point was meant to remind the reader that the novel was set in a different era with different cultural norms but it laboured the point somewhat annoyingly. Eunuchs during the heyday of the Ottoman Empire and even towards the decline were about as commonplace as sultans being deposed, harem politics and sending your heirs off to govern provinces. This reiteration of that point then again makes me wonder if the target audience are meant to be unfamiliar with that period and region in history.
Perhaps with the intention of adding to the flavour of the setting there are occasional segments describing Yashim cooking which don’t seem to add much of anything to anything else. The first time this occurs the point’s made that cooking helps him think and the section worked well enough, then it happened again and again in extended detail to the point where it appeared to be more or a pointless space filler more than anything else. Similarly the constant mention of people eating börek got old after a while. I like Ispanaklı Tepsi Böreği as much as the next man but like repeated mentions of Burmese people eating rice in a narrative or of Canadians eating poutine it stops being a nice indicator of context and becomes annoying if you do it all the time.
Another strange indicator of time and place that came up was during a crowd scene close to the end of the story where the narrative suddenly veered into mentioning several historical figures or rather the historical figures they would become. And while that could have been employed in fixing the events in the story to a time and place since there hadn’t been mentions of this sort of thing before it seemed a bit out of place.
Lastly then was the issue of the language used. While I understand that normalising the language used and bringing to the forefront how contemporary it was was the intent it struck me as rather choppily done. The characters seem quite happy to converse in reasonable language and then every so often that suddenly diverges into hard crime thriller language before veering away again. It would be a bit like reading A Whiff of Death where suddenly Louis Brade started swearing at people and shaking them down for information only to return to his normal behaviour a page later. And the jarring nature of this code switching is made all the worse by the fact that the narrative line does it as well as the character dialogue. There is also as an aside to this the crime thriller trope of the hero lingering over an indecipherable clue which appearing later on in the novel in a sharp contrast to the earlier obvious sections and was lingered over so much and without any real progress to the point that it started to get particularly annoying. Clues that the reader has no chance of understanding occur in the Sherlock Holmes stories but the compact nature of those stories save those clues from becoming tedious.
Overall then The Janissary Tree isn’t without its flaws and I can’t say that it delivered on evoking an absorbing or enthralling image of the Ottoman decline. On the other hand the myth of Aimée du Buc de Rivéry being the mother of Mahmud II (and not Mahmud IV as the text states) is believably employed in the story as is the atmosphere surrounding the events of 1826 so it’s not entirely a loss. The novel itself was an easy read by way of detective novels with the majority of flaws being aspects that I suspect with improve as the author’s writing does. I can’t say that I’m in a hurry to pick up the next novel in the series but if a copy came my way and I was bored one evening I might well give it a try.
Which brings me to the second issue of the narrative: the use of Turkish terms without explanation which is confusing if the target audience aren’t meant to know anything about the Ottoman Empire. I know that ‘valide’ means ‘mother’ but there’s certainly not enough in context within the narrative to really clue you in on that. And then there are strange uses of terms like ‘köçek’ and ‘karagözi’. From my general knowledge köçekler were specifically youths who presented as male, effeminate male certainly as far as the theatrics went but still distinctly not female and yet the novel never bothers to explain why in this case the term is being used as a synonym for some mixture of female impersonator and transwoman. Nor is the use of ‘karagözi’ explained. I could understand if the reference was to a simple layperson’s understanding of Sufism since the word refers to a stock character in a shadowplay who represents the straightforward public but within the context of the narrative it seems to describe a specific sect which is again not explained. A glossary of terms might have been nice just to explain how certain words were being used in context really.
Coming back to the point of foreshadowing the general plotline was peppered with what appeared to be foreshadowing of a big reveal regarding the trauma of Yashim’s becoming a eunuch. Unfortunately none of that went anywhere and since no further details were forthcoming it started to get old pretty quickly, especially when the main character himself, other characters and even the narrative line were constantly referring to his being a eunuch. I’m not sure if this constant reiteration of the point was meant to remind the reader that the novel was set in a different era with different cultural norms but it laboured the point somewhat annoyingly. Eunuchs during the heyday of the Ottoman Empire and even towards the decline were about as commonplace as sultans being deposed, harem politics and sending your heirs off to govern provinces. This reiteration of that point then again makes me wonder if the target audience are meant to be unfamiliar with that period and region in history.
Perhaps with the intention of adding to the flavour of the setting there are occasional segments describing Yashim cooking which don’t seem to add much of anything to anything else. The first time this occurs the point’s made that cooking helps him think and the section worked well enough, then it happened again and again in extended detail to the point where it appeared to be more or a pointless space filler more than anything else. Similarly the constant mention of people eating börek got old after a while. I like Ispanaklı Tepsi Böreği as much as the next man but like repeated mentions of Burmese people eating rice in a narrative or of Canadians eating poutine it stops being a nice indicator of context and becomes annoying if you do it all the time.
Another strange indicator of time and place that came up was during a crowd scene close to the end of the story where the narrative suddenly veered into mentioning several historical figures or rather the historical figures they would become. And while that could have been employed in fixing the events in the story to a time and place since there hadn’t been mentions of this sort of thing before it seemed a bit out of place.
Lastly then was the issue of the language used. While I understand that normalising the language used and bringing to the forefront how contemporary it was was the intent it struck me as rather choppily done. The characters seem quite happy to converse in reasonable language and then every so often that suddenly diverges into hard crime thriller language before veering away again. It would be a bit like reading A Whiff of Death where suddenly Louis Brade started swearing at people and shaking them down for information only to return to his normal behaviour a page later. And the jarring nature of this code switching is made all the worse by the fact that the narrative line does it as well as the character dialogue. There is also as an aside to this the crime thriller trope of the hero lingering over an indecipherable clue which appearing later on in the novel in a sharp contrast to the earlier obvious sections and was lingered over so much and without any real progress to the point that it started to get particularly annoying. Clues that the reader has no chance of understanding occur in the Sherlock Holmes stories but the compact nature of those stories save those clues from becoming tedious.
Overall then The Janissary Tree isn’t without its flaws and I can’t say that it delivered on evoking an absorbing or enthralling image of the Ottoman decline. On the other hand the myth of Aimée du Buc de Rivéry being the mother of Mahmud II (and not Mahmud IV as the text states) is believably employed in the story as is the atmosphere surrounding the events of 1826 so it’s not entirely a loss. The novel itself was an easy read by way of detective novels with the majority of flaws being aspects that I suspect with improve as the author’s writing does. I can’t say that I’m in a hurry to pick up the next novel in the series but if a copy came my way and I was bored one evening I might well give it a try.
