Jenny White, The Sultan's Seal (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006)
February was the coldest month this winter. We spent a lot more time than usual at the local shopping mall, since it was a far better place to take a walk than our ordinary outdoor haunts. Thus we also spent a lot more time than usual in the Borders Books and Music that sits on the parking lot next to the mall. On one of those visits, I spent time looking over the new book releases on display in the front of the store. My eye alighted with pleasure on the dust jacket for The Sultan's Seal, causing me to pick it up and open it. I liked what I saw, so I got a copy.
Mind you, the artwork on the dust jacket, for all its allure, represents the novel in only the most minimal way. It depicts a somewhat overdressed, veiled woman lounging on an ornate divan in a room with blue tiled walls. Outside the arched windows behind the woman, one can see a large tree, probably a plane (sycamore) and the silhouette of a man wearing a fez. He appears to be deep in thought. The exquisite patterns on the tiles, the divan, and the carpet on the floor attracted me to the book. To be honest, the lounging woman made me just a little nervous. Had I been able to see a bit more of her flesh, I would have suspected that this was one of those harem-based bodice-rippers. Mercifully, it's not!
I have been just a bit obsessed for the last year and more with fiction and non-fiction about the Middle East. Istanbul, that ancient and magical city on the cusp of Europe and Asia, is surely at the heart of my fascination with this part of the world. The more I read about it, the more familiar it becomes, until I find myself walking its streets in sleep and daydreams. The Sultan's Seal takes place in and near Istanbul in the 1880s. Not long ago, I read another novel set in this city -- The Rage of the Vulture, by Barry Unsworth. Although the primary action in that novel took place about twenty years later (early 1900s), this entire period witnessed the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, so I was already quite familiar with some of the social and political upheavals that provide the backdrop for White's narrative, and with some of the historical characters.
The Sultan's Seal is definitely an historical novel, which (besides its irresistible setting) was its initial appeal to me. But it's also a mystery novel. While I have considerable familiarity with this genre as presented in video and film, I haven't read many mysteries since I devoured Sherlock Holmes when I was still in high school, many years ago. The two that came to mind from my more recent forays into this genre as I read The Sultan's Seal were An Instance of the Fingerpost (whose author, Iain Pears, wrote one of the dust jacket blurbs) and My Name is Red (written by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk). The common denominator among these is each author's use of a narrative style that enables the reader to encounter multiple viewpoints on the situation and thus reach conclusions about the mystery that are not accessible to one or more of the main characters.
The mystery at the heart of The Sultan's Seal concerns the apparent murder of a young Englishwoman, her nude body found by garbage scavengers washed up on a bank of the Bosphorus north of Istanbul. The headman of the nearest village learns of the discovery from his sons, who are fishing nearby, and calls upon the magistrate Kamil Pasha to investigate. Kamil Pasha, the principal protagonist of this story, is an elite, the only son of the city's former minister of gendarmes. A 'modern' Turk, Kamil Pasha spent a year at Cambridge University, studying law and criminal procedures, and learning to speak English, as well. Although he is in his thirties and by no means unattractive, Kamil Pasha is not married. He lives in the villa left to him by his late mother with just a few servants and his orchid collection (this hobby immediately made me think of the eccentric private investigator Nero Wolfe). Kamil Pasha is a fundamentally decent human being who generally makes decisions from a rational, empirical basis. However, he sometimes has difficulties seeing past his own position in this highly stratified society. Roughly thre-fifths of the fifty-four chapters that comprise The Sultan's Seal are told from his perspective. These are written in third person, present tense. I occasionally found that verb tense a bit unnerving, I think because it's unconventional and didn't always make sense to me.
Six of the chapters in The Sultan's Seal are letters written by Sybil, the dutiful daughter of the British ambassador, who is present when Kamil Pasha makes his report to the ambassador about the death and first identifies the victim as an English governess working in the Sultan's court. Sybil becomes involved with the investigation and with Kamil Pasha. Lest you wonder if I am hinting that this really IS a bodice-ripper, please be assured that the relationship between Sybil and Kamil Pasha is entirely discreet. These are highly respectable late Victorians! Sybil's letters are addressed to her sister Maitlin, who lives in England with her husband and two young sons. Through them, the reader learns what Sybil discovers as she makes inquiries among members of the Sultan's harem who are inaccessible to the male magistrate. Not being very experienced at detective work or familiar with the intrigues of the Sultan's court, Sybil gets into trouble.
The rest of the chapters are written in first person, past tense, in a style suggestive of a memoir. While these chapters are absolutely crucial to the unfolding of the plot and the resolution of the mystery, I found it difficult to make sense of them until I was fairly far along in my reading. The writer is a young woman named Jaanan. Her narrative begins at the book's second chapter, several years earlier than the main action, when she was thirteen years old and living with her uncle Ismail in Chamyeri, a town some distance north of Istanbul on the Bosphorus. In the first piece of her writing, she reports on her discovery of another dead English woman, this one lying face down in a pond behind her uncle's house. This death has already been mentioned in the previous chapter as having some disturbing parallels to the one Kamil Pasha is investigating. The reader is very near the end of the novel before Jaanan's narrative catches up to present time and reveals some part of the truth.
I appreciate the publisher's inclusion of a small map of the region, showing the major places that characters visit and speak of. This helps the reader to become oriented to their relative locations. The book is full of common nouns in the Ottoman language (an amalgam of Turkish, Persian and Arabic). I recognized some of them from other books I've read, but some were completely unfamiliar. For example, Jaanan's uncle Ismail is a hodja. She refers to him in this context as 'a jurist and poet. . . .' That's not very helpful, and doesn't begin to explain why Kamil Pasha treats him with such respect and why his nephew Hamza is so insistent that Ismail show his active support for the work of the so-called Young Ottomans. As best I can tell from wandering the 'net, 'hodja' is an honorific title that means teacher, often in a religious sense. Probably the closest equivalent for most readers would be professor. Because it's not always possible to ascertain the meaning of these words from context, and definitions aren't easy to find, a glossary would be very helpful.
While The Sultan's Seal is Jenny White's first novel, it's worth knowing that she is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She has spent considerable time in Turkey and has written several scholarly works about Turkish society and politics, including Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics and 'State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman. An interview with White published in the February 9, 2006 on-line issue of Inside Higher Education suggests that she is having a great time dabbling in the world of fiction writing and publishing, which indeed has many practices and conventions that are not typical in the world of academic writing and publishing. She's getting paid, for one thing -- not a lot, but something. She also finds it novel (that's an intentional pun!) to have an agent, an editor, and a publicist. While it doesn't look like she's ready to give up her academic appointment, in another interview (on the Orion Publishing Web site), she reveals that she's already working on a sequel to The Sultan's Seal that continues the investigative adventures of Kamil Pasha. I'll be on the lookout for that!
