Blood Tie
by Mary Lee Settle
Summary
Ceramos is a small port on the Turkish coast, an old sponge diving town starting its conversion into a resort, and the novel gathers into it a colony of foreigners who have each come for reasons they misdescribe to themselves: an American divorcee named Ariadne, tending her garden and her solitude; a deposed academic; yachting drifters; smugglers of antiquities; the odd spy. Around and beneath them live the Turks of the town, fishermen, officials, a young diver who moves between the two worlds, and the novel's real business is the membrane between the colonies: what the expatriates think they understand of the place, and what the place actually knows about them.
Settle, who had lived for years in Turkey herself, builds Ceramos with a density few travel books manage, the caves and sea light, the politics of the coffee house, the surveillance that small towns and police states conduct in the same idiom, and she is ruthless about her foreigners, whose kindnesses are as self serving as their cruelties. Secrets accumulate, ancient and current, a submerged city, a hidden cave, contraband, an informer, until the community's tensions discharge, as they must, through its most vulnerable members.
Nobody in it is likeable for long, which is the design: the blood tie of the title binds and indicts everyone.
Around three hundred and ninety pages, slow building and atmospheric.
Best for readers who want the expatriate novel with the romance stripped out, closer to Bowles than to Durrell, from a writer who did the living herself.
Historical Context & Significance
Blood Tie won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1978, making Mary Lee Settle only the fourth woman in the fiction prize's twenty eight winners, a statistic the coverage noticed. The choice of a Turkish expatriate novel over more familiar names drew grumbling that had consequences: judging the following year's award soured Settle so thoroughly on the process, amid wider complaints that the prize had grown commercial, that in 1980 she founded the PEN/Faulkner Award, run and judged entirely by writers, which grew into the largest peer juried fiction prize in the country. Few winners have answered a prize by building a rival one.
Settle's main monument is the Beulah Quintet, five novels tracing West Virginia from Cromwell's England to the coalfields, a project of Faulknerian ambition that the quintet's admirers have been trying to move to the centre of the canon for decades.
She wrote Blood Tie after years living in Turkey, and died in 2005, a writer's writer to the end.