Gizli Emir (The Secret Order)

The novel opens with a strange silence: as if a huge meteorite had settled on the city, people walk on tiptoe as though afraid of waking a sleeping monster. The first exchange between a shoeshine boy, a public-toilet attendant and a coffee-house owner is the key to the whole book: «They say an order is coming. A secret order. Being secret, of course we won't hear it.» The coffee-house owner sends his apprentice to the newspaper every day to ask whether the order has arrived. An epileptic young man waits for it before getting married. Everyone's private life hangs on this invisible decision.

One of the best characters is the newspaper's doorman, «Write-It-Up Veli Bey». He considers himself a real journalist and tells people on the bus he is a reporter. Three days earlier, when the paper was raided, he locked his tiny room and phoned the newsroom with a second-by-second report. The next day the story put the attackers at four hundred instead of fifty and replaced «down with them» with «scoundrels, villains». When he goes upstairs he is told nobody was in the newsroom at the time and he spoke to no one. It is a small but very sharp tale about how truth is manufactured in the media.

The story of the translator Efdal provides the hardest pages. Walking home from a friend's house with his guitar, he is caught between an armed gang and a group of young people; the A.Y.O.T. officers watch, and no door opens. Beaten all the way, he takes refuge in the organisation's own building, where he can no longer tell who is beating him. He spends a year in a mental hospital and comes out calling every large building a «police station» — hospitals, banks, embassies. Anday writes violence not with blood and horror but in the cold language of the absurd, which makes it even more powerful.

At the heart of the novel is the meeting in editor-in-chief Kutsi's office. Six people — Ahmet the Politician, the former minister Fazlı, Doctor Amil, the writer Şermin, the engineer Fasih and Kutsi himself — wait for three days in a closed room, curtains drawn, beside the telephone. They spend hours debating where to eat, whether the office boy should stay at the door, and whether notes count as «minutes». Fazlı was a minister for a single day, Ahmet believes he was «born a leader», and Şermin has been screaming without warning ever since the Owl gang killed her husband. These scenes are among the most precise satires ever written about the inner life of political organisations.

The third chapter changes tone completely: a thirty-year-old, educated, beautiful woman — Nigar, widow of the painter Macit — asks the A.Y.O.T. director to register her in a brothel. He replies that brothels have been closed, then, unwilling to let such a «mystery» go, keeps her there and lectures her on his theory that the emergency should be treated as «normal». She is sent to the «Exits Department», where she is told that leaving requires a permit from room four, and room four is not working overtime tonight. These are the pages closest to Kafka's «The Castle».

In chapter four the sculptor Nizam's studio prepares an exhibition. A.Y.O.T. inspectors measure the staircase and ask «how will the attackers get through?» The debate between the critic Hulusi and the painter Ülkü — «does a city under torture need art?» — is the intellectual peak of the novel. The weakness is here too: these dialogues are long, abstract and at times read like a lecture. Still, «Gizli Emir» is one of the boldest political allegories in the Turkish novel.

• Cold irony that narrates the absurd in a perfectly serious tone
• A web of linked characters built from small episodes
• Dialogue that flawlessly mimics the language of political empty talk