Caroline Moore

Well of sorrows

The Red-haired Woman 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 father-figure 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, father-fashion, by Mahmut by telling the tale of Oedipus, with its implicit threat.

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