Book Review: “Nights of Plague” by Orhan Pamuk

Nights of Plague is set on the fictitious Mediterranean island of Mingheria in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century, a time when the Ottoman Empire was pertinently referred to as “the Sick Man of Europe”. Plague has broken out on the island and the Sultan Abdul Hamid II has sent one of his top physicians to the island to control the outbreak. The physician, Bonkowski Pasha is murdered, but the suggested murder mystery dwindles away and we are left with a very information rich tale of how the plague affected this island. The murder mystery may be there as a device to show the difference between East and West: Sherlock Holmes’ methods (we are told the Sultan is a fan as his his niece) contrasted with the Ottoman method of beating the prisoners feet to get a confession or information.

A plague outbreak on a far flung corner of an empire reminds me of Camus’ novel La Peste (The Plague) about a plague in Algeria, (as a Wordle player, I note Camus and Pamuk, both Noble Laureates, both have five letter names sharing the same middle three letters).

The world building is amazing and the history, culture, religious conflicts, politics and geography of this island comes to life, the book gives us a lot of information about Mingheria, the Ottoman Empire and the bubonic plague. The author has clearly done his homework. The original novel was published in Turkish in the midst of the Covid Epidemic in 2021 and is due to be published in English in October of this year. This may have influenced the subject matter. There is much written about the quarantine measures and the flouting of quarantine by the inhabitants of the island. The storytelling is in the style of a true history narrated by the great granddaughter of Princess Pakize living in our own times and feels very dry and repetitive. Princess Pakize is one of the more interesting characters, she is the niece of the Sultan and comes to the island with her new husband the Prince Consort Doctor Nuri. She is used to being confined as an Ottoman Princess, so the confinement imposed by quarantine regulations isn’t alien to her and a lot of the narrative is gleaned from the letters she writes to her sister Hatice.

A story of plague and revolution is going to have a high body count and like a George R R Martin story many principle characters are killed off in the course of the story. The pacing is quite uneven, there is a strong start, followed by a languid and repetitive middle as the plague counts get worse and then quite a rushed ending (not counting the overlong epilogue). This book lacks the mystery and emotional depth of Pamuk’s greater novels like My Name is Red or Snow. Maybe this was what Pamuk wanted, it reads like a history book, we don’t get into the feelings of fear of the Mingherians faced with this plague, the feelings we might expect expressed in a novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers Knopf for an advanced reader copy, I leave this review voluntarily.

My rating: 3 out of 5

Expected publication in English, translation by Ekin Oklap: October 4th 2022