An embarrassment of bad sentences

'Turkey’s Kafka’ seems to have let the plaudits go to his head, with bad consequences for his art.

The acclaimed Turkish author Hasan Ali Toptas. Courtesy Bloomsbury

Hasan Ali Toptas is among Turkey’s most admired writers. Almost all of his novels have won prizes. It is common to refer to him as the Kafka of Turkish letters. He is often compared favourably with Orhan Pamuk. And in common with Pamuk, he is a recipient of his country’s most prestigious literary award, the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize.

As one would expect of a writer who has met with this kind of acclaim, Toptas's works have been widely translated. Yet Reckless is the first of his volumes to appear in English. On the strength of this offering, I should not be sorry if it were to prove the last.

The novel tells the story of Ziya Bey. Ziya wants to leave the chaos of the city in which he currently lives, and is about to embark on a journey to a remote village where he hopes to spend his days with his old army friend, Kenan. He also hopes that he will find there a life of tranquillity, an environment in which he can forget the years of his life he devoted to military service on the Syrian-Turkish border, forget the loss of his wife, forget the loss of his child.

It is an excruciatingly portentous affair, a tale in which dream, memory and reality bleed into one another, in which senses are often out of joint (smells are heard, sounds are seen), and in which sliding shadows and significant birds (Toptas’s favourite motifs) are made to do an almost undignified amount of atmospheric and symbolic work. This is particularly true of the first third of the book, in which the reader is subjected to almost 100 pages of Ziya’s dreams.

You don’t have to be a particularly devoted admirer of Henry James (“Tell a dream, lose a reader”) to find this testing: Toptas’s prose is so bad as to make the subject matter irrelevant. Take, to begin with, the novel’s dialogue. In addition to its almost bracing lifelessness (“‘It is, but it’s very strange,’ said Ziya Bey, looking puzzled. ‘It’s not possible that you know all this.’”), it manages to treat the reader with something pretty close to contempt by furnishing perfectly comprehensible lines of speech with superfluous adjectives and adverbs: “‘Don’t just lie there. Time to get up!’ said Nurgul Hanim in a reproachful voice”; “In shock, he cried, ‘They found me!’” This is the kind of writing that emerges when condescension towards the reader combines with a failure to trust the power of language.

These deficiencies are compounded by a carelessness that is most readily apparent in Toptas’s anti-talent for cliché. In the space of a single page I counted “took leave of her senses”; “the straw that broke the camel’s back”; “at our wits’ end”; “know no bounds”; “sands of time”; “they ran like the wind”. These are joined by all manner of thoughtless constructions (birds have “beady eyes”; houses are “buzzing like a beehive”; people wait with “bated breath” and exchange “knowing looks”).

Perhaps most irritating, however, is Toptas’s weakness for alerting us to immediacy. There isn’t much in this book that doesn’t happen “suddenly”. Sometimes we are told about the suddenness twice, as in the sublime sentence “Suddenly, they all came to an abrupt halt.” Sometimes things are even more instantaneous: “His mind slipped away, very suddenly, to the Syrian border. And then, just as suddenly, a shaft of light slipped in.”

I am, of course, being selective. But not that selective: the sheer concentration of infelicities in this novel must set some kind of record. Can the same be said of Toptas’s other fiction? If not, how are we to explain his latest offering? A possible answer has been ventured by Toptas himself. Asked in an interview what can happen to a writer when he or she is the recipient of great approbation, he replied: “Too much applause makes your pen quake, it can send your pen in the wrong direction.” Perhaps, then, it is best to be generous, and conclude that this is the reason he has got so lost here.

Matthew Adams is based in London and writes for TLS, The Spectator and the Literary Review.