Birds Without Wings

Louis de Bernieres' love story set during the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

TIM MARLOW:
Bonnie Greer, it's 625 pages. We have waited ten years for it. Is it worth that wait?

BONNIE GREER:
Well, it was for me, in the sense that I learned an enormous amount about that history which I really am grateful for learning. Also, to get the Islamic viewpoint of Gallipoli, the awesome research he has put into it - that's ten years worth of work in itself. In that sense, I really enjoyed the book. Unfortunately for me, the story started to kick in on page 332, which is kind of late to get into a story. It isn't Captain Corelli's Mandolin. We don't have a Captain Corelli. We have lots of different characters. We can't hold on to any one and we want to hold on to someone in a story like this. But at the same time, it's a wonderful achievement, and I am really grateful for having read it and the things I learned.

TIM MARLOW:
There is 101 chapters plus an epilogue. It's an ambitiously structured book. Do you commend that about it?

TOM PAULIN:
I am afraid not. I was extremely annoyed by it. He invents a noun called "terribleness". He does extraordinarily stupid things with the English language and confects something that reads like a translation of a translation, written in this winsome pseudo-poetic prose which doesn't work. It's hugely hostile to Muslims...

BONNIE GREER:
Tom!

TOM PAULIN:
...I mean, not only are they endlessly stopped and searched in this country but they have Louis de Bernieres on their track the whole time. It's full of references to hook-nosed Arabs and Jews, it is a hatred of the Islamic world balanced in a pseudo way by saying "oh yes, the Christians did some wrong things too". It is rotten with orientalism. dI had just finished reading orientalism the other morning and I picked up this wretched book. I wanted to throw it out the door. It is a stinking rotten book written by a pseudo hopeless novelist.

BONNIE GREER:
Tom, no. I don't agree with that at all. Those images that you talk about are from points of view. They are from the characters' points of view.

TOM PAULIN:
There are no characters! There are 6,000 non-entities in this book.

BONNIE GREER:
I am not saying that there are characters there, but they are from points of view. I do not believe it's the author's point of view.

TIM MARLOW:
There are many, many voices in Louis de Bernieres' books and we've got many voices round this discussion so let's bring in John's point of view. John, does this attempt to try and give many, many voices - is it a cacophony in your ears?

JOHN MULLAN:
It is. It's a pity we get heated about the politics because what Tom said at the beginning is the important thing, which is why I think formally the book fails. You can commend it for its ambitions but I don't think a book is ever really any good just for its ambitions. We have all these, not just characters, but the point is we have all these narrators. We have all sorts of people telling stories. I am afraid the impression I got from it - de Bernieres himself says his books grow organically - my impression I got is that he invents it as he goes along and sometimes I think he forgets about what he has invented earlier. It's like a sack into which he pours people and voices, and we are supposed to admire that for points of views of tolerance.

TOM PAULIN:
From a single point of view, to replicate white European Protestant culture over everything else! Absolutely standard imperialist.

BONNIE GREER:
There is an interesting line that I thought was fascinating. When he talks about Allenby taking over Jerusalem and talks about the split of the two different sides of Islam, and that was a fascinating thing. There were the so-called "British" Arabs fighting with Allenby and the other Arabs, Islamic Arabs fighting with Ataturk.

TOM PAULIN:
The treatment of Ataturk is disgraceful. He praises him for being basically attracted to European culture. He has no sense of this great political genius and makes him into a trivial character.

TIM MARLOW:
Bonnie has just said she learned aspects of history she didn't know. Not everyone is necessarily as well versed in orientalism as you are. John, this is the first time we don't get an Antipodean view of Gallipoli, we get an Islamic or Turkish one. That's worth looking at, isn't it?

JOHN MULLAN:
Yes, but behind it all the time you feel the pressure of the author and his purposes. What Bonnie said in praise of him seems to be another aspect of why the novel fails. You learn about history; there's great big slabs of history. He just stuffs them in.

BONNIE GREER:
Exactly. He did lots of research.

JOHN MULLAN:
Tom doesn't like it because he thinks the history is wrong...

TOM PAULIN:
No, it's the attitudes that are wrong. He says - take Gallipoli - if the Ottomans hadn't won it, he says, there would have been no Russian revolution, no Cold War. You think, "What on earth is this omniscient narrator in his Georgian rectory built out of the money he has made from his rotten novel and rotten film writing another terrible novel."

BONNIE GREER:
Tom, the other part is that Turkish people have said Ataturk is probably one of the greatest men in history.

TOM PAULIN:
A very important figure.

BONNIE GREER:
Absolutely. One of the things you take away is his impact on that part of the world and for readers of his work that's very important. He doesn't put down the Islamic religion.

TOM PAULIN:
He does.