2001-10-25 A superb sense of time and place - excellent!

This novelist's themes are invariably unusual and gripping, reminiscent in some ways of Joseph Conrad in their relentless - and uncomfortable - exploration of the darker recesses of the human spirit. "The Rage of the Vulture" is set in the false dawn of the Young Turk revolution that promised so much, as it swept away the tyranny of tyranny of Abdul Hamid and which offered a brief glimpse of ethnic harmony before plunging the Ottoman Empire into yet more terrible chaos and genocide. With spare but telling detail Unsworth portrays a society, and individuals, poisoned and warped by hatred, cruelty and fear and incapable of breaking the cycle of perpetuation. The main character, an English officer on secondment in Istanbul, is no less maimed spiritually - and ultimately physically - by this unending tyranny than the most depraved torturers of the dying regime. The most memorable feature of the novel is however the extent to which the malign, self-loathing and all but invisible personality of Abdul Hamid dominates the action - and the city - from his curious bourgeois villa retreat - one hesitates to say Palace - high above the Bosphorous. By a curious turn of fate I read this novel some three months before being sent, quite unexpectedly, to live and work in Turkey and to spend long periods in Istanbul. It had already made a strong impression on me - and this became even stronger as I explored many of the locales of the action. The phrase "the banality of evil" is horribly appropriate as one spends an hour at the same kiosk in Abdul Hamid's gardens where, insisting on the farce of being incognito, he would insist on paying for his own glass of tea before hurrying back to indulge in his hobby of cabinet making, order a massacre or allow the cries of his menagerie beasts to drown out the screams of wretches being interrogated close by. Mr.Unsworth melds this background very effectively into the plot of his powerful and disturbing book, which is not only absorbing to read but impossible to forget.