“Nights of Plague”
By Orhan Pamuk
Knopf, 704 pages

“Nights of Plague,” the latest doorstopper from Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s sole Nobel laureate to date, is what the late Northrop Frye would call an “anatomy” — rather than attempting to conjure the psychological nuance of the realist novel, it tells its stories through the quasi-encyclopedic treatment of a subject, in this case, a fictional Mediterranean island. Anatomies are high-wire acts; the greatest example, “Moby-Dick,” tends to be more invoked than read. While Mr. Pamuk cannot be said to have made an easy entry in the genre, “Nights of Plague” has significant charms.

The book, purportedly composed from material drawn from the personal papers of the fictional Princess Pakize, daughter of the deposed sultan Murad V and niece of Abdülhamid II, addresses an outbreak of bubonic plague on the fictional island of Mingheria in 1901. After the assassination of Bonkowski Pasha, the top Ottoman infectious disease specialist, Pakize and her husband, Nuri, must grapple with obstructionist government officials and the divisions cleaving Mingherian society to find the killer and stop the plague. 

If this sounds like a heavy-handed COVID allegory, it’s because it is. Bonkowski Pasha, before his untimely decease, delivers exhortations to the Mingherian governor about the importance of prompt and total quarantine measures, the cooperation of Christian and Muslim populations, the inadequacies of the backward population’s own medical expertise. “The populace must be allowed to worry, shopkeepers must face the fear of death, if they are to follow quarantine measures willingly once they are introduced,” Bonkowski Pasha tells the governor of Mingheria. Not exactly subtle stuff.

If characters and dialogue tend to be vehicles for Mr. Pamuk’s own political and historical fixations, “Nights of Plague” nevertheless has its strengths. Mr. Pamuk takes great care on the description of the eastern Mediterranean’s landscapes and the material culture and politics of the late Ottoman period; the reader almost wishes he had devoted his attention to a nonfiction treatment of the period. Imperial collapse, secret police, the triumphs and failures of pluralistic societies, the confrontation of religion, especially Islam, with the modern world — the rule of the late sultans certainly has much to offer.

This is to say that the most anatomy-like portions of “Nights of Plague” are the most compelling. The characters are wooden, the dialogue stilted, and the plot is not up to the heft of the book; but the long digressions on Mingheria’s fictional history, cunningly interwoven with the real story of the former territories of the Ottoman Empire, are so captivating that a reader of the right frame of mind doesn’t mind the rest. A sharper editor might have suggested Mr. Pamuk cut the more conventionally novelistic material in favor of more pseudo-history, or a shorter page count — but it is difficult to stand up to a Nobel winner.

It is as if the “Zembla” sections of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” which render an account of a fictional kingdom through which the narrator (and Nabokov himself) reckons with the loss of his tsarist Russian homeland, were expanded to the length of “War and Peace,” which provides the epigraph for Mr. Pamuk’s book. One might wish for a more conventionally moving, “realist” component to  “Nights of Plague” — “Pale Fire” again comes to mind, this time as a foil — but this desire should not obscure the book’s significant virtues.

Mr. Pamuk’s political differences with the currently prevailing strain of Turkish nationalism, particularly his frankness about the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish question, have made him something of a Western cause celebre. This sort of fame, however, threatens to miss his virtues as a writer: a cleverness for composition, a knack for laying out Turkish history’s complications, a talent for description. “Nights of Plague” displays his full powers.