The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler
This historic thriller by
opens on board the
Lusitania
during its final fateful journey. The infamous sinking of that passenger liner by a German U-boat in 1915 is well known; the reader waits in trepidation for the inevitable.
Other aspects of the inevitable in this book are certain well-used tropes. Our American narrator is a tough guy hero. A knowledgeable war correspondent and journalist, this polyglot son of an actress mother has been recruited as a spy.
For the sake of his country, he finds and follows his quarry. While doing so, he meets and makes love to a mysterious and beautiful actress, then saves her life when the ship goes down. And there's more...
The story turns on the idea of acting -- people and situations keep changing, getting
into a lot of tight corners as they do. Kit is good at thinking, but he's learned from covering wars that 'nobody can think fast enough to live in an emergency - thinking is how you die.' In an emergency, the only way to survive is to react.
This story is well-researched and full of contemporary references to the geopolitical situation a century ago. Journalist Kit speaks of how Woodrow Wilson "invaded Mexico last spring to kick out a tin-pot dictator and to protect American oil interests." After "avidly talking neutrality in Europe," he'd expedited "ongoing sale and shipment of American arms to Britain." Will the sinking of the
Lusitania
bring America into the war, Kit wonders? [It did.]
This author's language is fresh and irreverent, his ironic portrayal of British cultural rituals memorable. Arriving at the Waldorf in London, Kit comments that "we who survived the Lusitania would be checking into its immobilized
doppelganger,
as if we'd in fact all drowned on Friday and this was a meticulously bespoke purgatory." His relentless description of the gourmet meal he shares with Mr. Metcalf is downright grotesque.
In a different tone, channeling Mark Twain or Stephen Leacock or both, he likens the profusion of minarets in Galata to that of "smokestacks in Pittsburgh." Hilariously, he states that the German helmet called the
protects "very little except the feelings of inadequacy of the officer beneath it." The villain's smile is "part irony, part taffeta."
As the plot gallops forward, the author brings in a lot of history. I was surprised to learn that the
-- famed for its Paris to Istanbul passenger service -- ran over a line that was part of a longer project of railway building. The narrator calls the "vaunted"
, which would pass through the
, "the great umbilical of Germany's nascent Asian empire." The geopolitical conflicts touched on in the story are chillingly similar to the ones we witness around us today.
Butler's description is evocative -- the ancient city of Istanbul rises before the reader, with its hilly narrow streets crowding along the blue Bosporus, replete with all manner of sights, smells, and sounds. In that teeming city, along with besuited and befezzed Turks, we see and hear
, Armenians, and Greeks, as well as plenty of bored European tourists who dine and drink and go to the theatre in close proximity to the touristic and Frenchified
.
In the company of the philosophical narrator, we navigate "the deep currents of history." It is, he says, the "manifesto of any band of nationalists" -- few, unfocused, disorganized and "accustomed to repression" though they may be -- that a single isolated act can change everything. Indeed, says Kit, "an anonymous, undersized Bosnian teenager with a nationalist cause and a sandwich in his hand started the war with two bullets."
We are also asked to confront "the murderous inertia humans are capable of." With Kit Cobb, we enter a Turkish coffee house where heartfelt and genuinely friendly
are exchanged with him over coffee and tobacco -- the "infidel" is after all, a fellow human. Along with him, we consider the remarkably similar history of Christians and Muslims: "marching into countries where a bunch of folks thought differently about you and God and you ground your religious heel into their throats."
teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University. In addition to his novels and short stories, he is the author of a book about the creative process,
.
The historic and luxurious
is still a going concern. The deluxe Golden Horn room starts at 167 Euros per night. History and buffs can splash out and book the Mata Hari suite, film fans can choose the Greta Garbo corner room or the Alfred Hitchcock suite, and literary types can stay in rooms commemorating Agatha Christie or Ernest Hemingway, who also stayed there.