Istanbul of the mind.

• Author: Raw, Laurence
• Position: 'Istanbul Passage,' 'Istanbul: Perfect Gems of City Writing' and 'Sailing Through Byzantium' - Book review

Istanbul Passage

By Joseph Kanon

London: Simon and Schuster, 2013, 404 pages, $11.85, ISBN 978147398345

Istanbul: Perfect Gems of City Writing

By Ilhan Ciler

London: Oxygen Books in association with the British Council, 2013, 254 pages,

9.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN 9780955970092

Sailing Through Byzantium

By Maureen Freely

Edinburgh: Linen Press, 2013, 278 pages, $13.65, ISBN 9780957596818

While traveling through, Istanbul can often prove overwhelming for tourists and locals alike, people often find different strategies to make sense of their experiences. Several foreigners have drawn on a lexicon of tropes and/or images that represent the city as strange and mysterious--the epitome of eastern promise. By doing so they invoke the kind of orientalist metaphors that date as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, when western aristocrats embarking on the Grand Tour became fascinated with the Ottoman Empire. This stance suggests a basic resistance to empa thizing with other cultures: although Istanbul might prove fascinating, its charms are best kept at a distance.

Joseph Kanon's Istanbul Passage offers a case in point. Structurally speaking, it is a tightly plotted spy thriller set in Second World War Istanbul, wherein expat business traveler Leon Bauer is drawn into a shadowy world of intrigue, carrying out undercover odd jobs for a variety of paymasters while sustaining good relations with the American Embassy in Ankara. While attempting to do his bit for the Allied war effort, Leon can never be sure of the outcomes of his various missions in a city teeming with refugees and spies trafficking in secrets and lies. The book's chief attraction lies in Kanon's narrative of Leon's actions that prove surprising for readers and the protagonist alike.

Geographically speaking, Istanbul Passage is carefully plotted; the author has done his research into various areas of the city--Beyoglu, Laleli, Bebek, Uskudar--and what they looked like during the Forties with their decaying buildings and innumerable back streets. He has also studied the transport system--as Leon moves from the European to the Asian side and back again, we feel that we are by his side, sharing the journeys with him. On the other hand Istanbul is continually represented in terms of orientalist metaphors; it is "magical" with its "smell of frying fish, trays piled with simit (Turkish bagel-like bread) balanced on vendors' heads, boats crowding the Eminonu piers, everything noisy and sunlit" (p. 22). Why the sight of a simit-seller should appear so magical is left tantalizingly unexplained. At night, the city casts a forbidding shadow: "Down the hill three men appeared out of the shadows, probably on their way to a meyhane (Turkish bar where alcohol is served). The night belonged to men here, roaming the streets in bored groups, the women safely shuttered away" (p. 47). The city's imperial past casts a threatening shadow over the present: "You know there were five hundred slaves in Yildiz then? Not forty years ago, not even history yet. Slaves here. And people listening in trees" (p. 77). The Bosphorus, separating the city over two continents, possesses its own peculiar mystique: "there were two currents [...] the surface current flowing south and a deep undercurrent flowing north, dense and saline, strong enough to drag a fishing boat by...