Elif Shafak’s subjects are sombre but, as her new novel shows, her magical-realist style is anything but
If Ms Shafak’s subjects are sombre, her magical-realist style is anything but. Her new novel, which addresses the turbulent history of Cyprus, is partly narrated by a fig tree. The story opens in London, where the teenage Ada is mourning the death of her mother Defne, a Muslim Turkish-Cypriot who had become prone to drink. Ada suspects that Defne’s decision to emigrate and to marry her father, Kostas—a Christian Greek-Cypriot—was a difficult one.
Cutting between past and present, the novel tells the story of Defne’s and Kostas’s romance. Teenagers in Cyprus in the 1970s, their courtship takes place against a backdrop of rising violence between Turkish and Greek paramilitaries in the wake of Cyprus’s independence from Britain .
The transformative role played by the fig tree is unlikely to surprise readers of Ms Shafak’s previous novels, or Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Its presence affords bittersweet relief, not to mention an outlet for digressions on a range of subjects, from Cyprus’s illegal trade in songbirds to its eradication of malaria in the 1940s. The overlapping timelines produce a busy and fast-moving narrative focused on healing as well as grief.
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