Molly Guinness

Agonised questions

In her latest novel, Shafak deals with enough vexed themes to qualify as a UN special envoy

It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who gives seminars about God. The scene is set for a romantic crisis. Fourteen years later, Peri has a violent encounter with a tramp that brings it all back.

Shafak is an international pin-up: Three Daughters of Eve is her tenth novel, but she’s also a founding member of a foreign affairs thinktank, has an active role at the World Economic Forum, defends gay rights and has been prosecuted by the Turkish government. People on Twitter adore her. This is a very serious book and in it she deals with enough vexed themes to qualify as a UN special envoy.

Peri keeps a diary where she writes down her feelings about God. She’s constantly having thoughts like this: ‘Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?’ That’s how she lives, question after agonised question.

The young people she talks to are just as brooding.

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