Birds without Wings is well researched, accurate historical fiction!
Set in Asia Minor at the end of the Ottoman Empire which coincided with WW1, there were ethnic Greeks living in Asia Minor who spoke Turkish better than Greek or even no Greek at all.
There were ethnic Turks living in Greece who spoke Greek better than Turkish or even no Turkish at all.
There were Greeks living in Russia, Turks living in the Balkans and all around this time some people started saying " Greece for the Greeks, Turks and Jews out", "Turkey for the Turks, Greeks and Armenians out" and in the meantime the Russians were invading the Caucasus and had plans for expansion all over Eastern Europe and Western Asia. The Western Europeans all had their own personal agendas as well. All this lead to endless massacres and repopulating that uprooted millions of people.
The story is told by multiple P.O.V.s of villagers in the fictional town of Eskibahçe in southwest Turkey, alternating with accounts of the life of Mustafa Kemal, aka Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who became the first leader of modern Turkey.
My favourite characters were the villagers, but I appreciated the timeline of Mustafa Kemel Ataturk as well. At a certain point, there were even more characters and more details, in particular about the various battles in particular the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign, and it started to feel tedious.
Were it about 200 pages shorter, this would be a perfect novel!
That being said, this book written in 2004 is very relevant in 2018 with the election of nationalist and populist leaders all over the world.
Although it's not conveyed in a heavy handed way, Louis de Bernieres message is pretty clear, multi ethnic and multicultural societies are rich and wanting to only be around own own ethnic group leads only to violence and suffering.




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Either de Bernières' wife cheated on him with an Armenian, or the Turkish government funded this book. I have never read anything so anti-Armenian. There is one Armenian character with whom he get acquainted in the Ottoman town, and his name is Levon the Sly. Like Schlomo the Sly in a pre-Nazi German village, right? Those cunning, clever Armenians.

De Bernières gives exacting numbers as to how many Muslims were slaughtered by Russians in countless little-known massacres. When it comes to how many Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks, he first exonerates the Turks by passing off all blame to the Kurds (who were hired by the Turks to kill), and he excuses the killings because the Armenians were traitors to the Ottoman Empire anyway, and then he says that "it doesn't matter" whether 300,000 or 2 million were massacred, because it's a tragedy in either case. As if the NY Times didn't run continuous articles on the Genocide as it happened, as if Morgenthau didn't resign because the US government did not step in to help the Armenians.

The reviews are quite negative, I don't know how a book about mass killings, stonings, and whores can possibly be this tedious to get through, and it's downright racist to the Christians oppressed in the dying throes of the Ottoman Empire. De Bernières writes with the cultural appropriation that only someone from a country that has never been through genocide can finesse.

I thought about giving this book an extra star because of the lovely descriptive writing, but in terms of plot and characterization, I would actually rate this quite low. The plot is simply a retelling of the "ethnic cleansing" of Greek-speaking Muslims and Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians that occurred in Greece and Turkey after World War I, and the characters never felt like more than mouthpieces for the author's outrage at the suffering inflicted on thousands of completely innocent people who were forced to leave their homes and travel to what was, for them, a foreign country, simply because of their religious affiliation. None of the characters seem particularly three-dimensional, and the most vivid memory I have of the novel is actually the descriptions of the little village on the coast of Anatolia, which sounds lovely.

The author also seems to have a political agenda that I kept being confronted by - although he doesn't deny that the Turkish authorities and people working for them committed atrocities, his descriptions of the atrocities commited by the Greeks are much more vivid, and then he turns around and says something like "the Turks did the same things when they got into power."

Also, he seems to heavily imply that the Armenians brought their genocide on themselves by "treacherously" aiding the Russians in World War I, and I'm pretty sure there were huge massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1895-1897, long before World War I, during the same period that the author seems to regard as a golden age of multicultural and multiethnic tolerance. (There were at least tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Armenians murdered and tortured during this period, so I beg leave to wonder at this supposed tolerance that was only disturbed by the Young Turks and their revolution. I think that it's a misleadingly rosy view of the Ottoman Empire during the period of its slow decline.) Moreover, the accusations of treachery during wartime, in any case only applied to a small proportion of the Armenian population and doesn't explain why thousands of people who had nothing to do with the Russians were also deported, raped, tortured and murdered. By not mentioning the earlier massacres - about which Barry Unsworth wrote a fine historical novel called The Rage of the Vulture - de Bernieres doesn't provide any context for WHY the Armenians already felt little allegiance to the Ottoman Empire that had treated them so callously. So that really turned me off the novel! (De Bernieres also implies that the Armenians under Russian command did the same things to the Kurds who had been so responsible for murdering Armenians as though everyone were equally guilty, and I'm not 100% convinced that's actually true.)

All in all, a very unsatisfying read, and not the awesome followup to Corelli's Mandolin for which I was hoping!

This novel lacks the narrative drive of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (the one that was made into that awful movie starring Nicolas Cage), but it has the same extraordinarily beautiful turn of phrase that makes Bernieres' books such wonderful reading. Birds Without Wings is the story of a Turkish town through the first part of the 20th C and the wars that gradually dismembered the Ottoman Empire. The history is enlightening and the fiction heartbreaking as the endless cycle of revenge killings gradually destroys the town (and most of what is modern Turkey). Ironies abound -- Greek Turks are displaced for "real" Turks -- who speak only Greek. The Muslims suffer economically when the Christians are forced out because with them go the doctors, accountants, and most of the skilled labor. Bernieres clearly doesn't think much of the great powers' games of conquest, and all sides equally come in for satire and criticism. The nicest occupiers? The Italians, because they can't be bothered to do much of anything except play backgammon and drink raki. The worst? The Turks themselves, justifying their actions by saying that the Greeks did the same things. By the time you've finished reading Birds Without Wings, you want to give the whole region a wide berth.