Love and tragedy in Orhan Pamuk’s Oedipean tale
The book explores themes of parricide and filicide — and a teenager’s fateful search for a father figure
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity — ostensibly by a narrator who knows that he is not a writer, but only a building contractor. Polyphonic narratives are replaced by a powerful, engaging clarity. This simplicity is the novel’s greatest strength, yet at certain points seems as if it might become a weakness.
Part one, which takes up the first half of the book, is superbly concentrated. It describes one summer in 1986 in the life of Cem, a middle-class 16-year-old boy who takes on a summer job 30 miles outside Istanbul to earn money before cramming for university entrance exams. Ignoring his mother’s misgivings — his father, a pharmacist and political dissident, has gone missing — he joins a master well-digger as his apprentice.
The episode evokes the disturbing intensity of adolescent experience. Cem’s unformed character shimmers in the disorientating heat: he is capable of being both frightened and foolhardy, both meek and rebellious.
Master Mahmut has his own mystique. In Turkey, where water is priceless, a digger of wells is traditionally revered. Mahmut, using his ancient skills, stubbornly insists upon digging down in an unpromising barren plateau. As Mahmut and Cem excavate, metre by hard-won metre, the bond between them becomes central. Mahmut, it is made clear, becomes a fatherfigure to fatherless Cem. But his tender attentions are edged with domineering brutality:
When helping me to bathe, Master Mahmut, half out of concern and half to tease, would press his thick coarse fingers into any bruises he spotted on my back; and when I shuddered and groaned ‘Ow’ in response, he would laugh and tell me tenderly to ‘be more careful next time’.
Cem, in return, responds to the evening fables recounted, fatherfashion, by Mahmut by telling the tale of Oedipus, with its implicit threat.
The well itself casts a dark gravitational pull. Wells are always both sinister and life-giving: it is no accident that in Japan they are seen as gateways to the underworld. In Pamuk’s earlier novel, My Name is Red, the murdered body of the miniaturist is thrown down a well. In The Red-haired Woman, Cem’s panic when, against his mother’s orders, he is sent down the well is vividly rendered: terror somewhere between claustrophobia and inverted vertigo, compounded by the dread of abandonment.
The eponymous redhaired woman is the older woman needed in this impending tragedy. On a trip into the nearest town for supplies, Cem catches a glimpse of her, and is instantly obsessed. She is a travelling player, and her troupe performs scenes — of Sohrab and Rostam, and Abraham and Isaac — with a theme of filicide.
At times, this mythic mix threatens to become heavy-handed. This is particularly true in part two, which traces Cem’s life after the violent episode which ends that all-changing summer.
But the final section, which changes narrators and shows the narrative clarity to be illusory, escapes from this expository over-simplification. The themes of parricide and filicide resonate beyond acts of accidental or mindless murder. By arrangement with
the Spectator