My Name Is Red

In Istanbul in 1591, a miniaturist working in secret on an illustrated book commissioned by the Ottoman sultan is murdered and thrown down a well, and Orhan Pamuk opens the novel with the dead man himself narrating from wherever a corpse narrates from, describing his own body at the bottom of the well before the story moves on to the living. Black, a miniaturist and bookbinder recently returned to Istanbul after twelve years away, is drawn into the investigation through his uncle, Enishte Effendi, who is overseeing the secret commission, a book painted partly in the Venetian style the workshop's older masters consider close to blasphemy. Suspicion settles on three of the workshop's own miniaturists, nicknamed Butterfly, Stork and Olive, any one of whom might be hiding the killer's identity inside his own drawings; the dead man, the gilder Elegant Effendi, is soon joined by Enishte himself, murdered in his own house.

Pamuk builds the mystery out of an argument about art itself, whether a painter should render the world as it looks to human eyes, the Venetian and increasingly Western approach the secret book represents, or as God sees it, the older, flatter tradition the workshop's master, Osman, has spent his life defending, and the murderer's own chapters keep circling that argument even while hiding his identity behind it. Black is also drawn back toward his cousin Shekure, Enishte's widowed daughter, whom he loved before he left Istanbul and pursues again now alongside the investigation, negotiating her two young sons, a jealous brother in law and a matchmaker named Esther who ferries letters between them through the city's back streets. The novel gives voice to twenty one different narrators in all, including a horse, a dog, a coin and the color red itself, each account complicating rather than simplifying who can be trusted. The killer is finally unmasked as Olive, whose flight from the city ends when Shekure's brother in law Hasan cuts him down, and Black, wounded in that last struggle, settles into the marriage with Shekure he came home for.

Reading it means following a detective story that keeps turning into an argument about representation, faith and artistic tradition, which rewards a patient reader more interested in atmosphere and idea than in a fast moving plot. Istanbul in 1591 is rendered in extraordinary sensory detail, its workshops, coffeehouses and back alleys, and it suits anyone drawn to historical fiction willing to let a whole culture's argument with itself carry as much weight as the murder that sets the story moving.