The Winds Of War

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9A02E5DA113AF932A05753C1A9629C8 B63 The Winds of War BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS By Louis de Bernières. 554 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. Louis de Bernières's overstuffed new novel is an absorbing epic about the waning years of the Ottoman Empire -- but you may need to develop your own mental filing system to keep up with all its characters and incident. Set in the fictional town of Eskibahce on the coast of southwest Anatolia (now in Turkey), ''Birds Without Wings'' has 95 chapters -- not to mention a six-part epilogue -- that give us the perspectives of dozens of characters. There is no central protagonist to guide the proceedings; you might care more about one character than another, but only a couple are on view for any length of time. A good deal of research has clearly gone into ''Birds Without Wings,'' which opens in 1900 and ends in the early 1920's. The narrative's scattered approach will be familiar to readers of de Bernières, a selfproclaimed ''Márquez parasite'' whose ouevre includes a panoramic trilogy set in a fictional Andean village. De Bernières reached a wider audience with ''Corelli's Mandolin'' (1994), which was made into a mildly corny movie starring Nicolas Cage. That novel was far more fluid and accessible than this latest; while political concerns drove much of the story, the relationship between Corelli and the daughter of a local doctor gave the book an emotional core. ''Birds Without Wings'' opens with a group of loosely connected anecdotes; only gradually do they begin to pick up weight. But the central figure here is Eskibahce itself -- a town, we learn early on, that will eventually be destroyed. De Bernières rhapsodically evokes the pastelhued houses, the songbirds that warble in cages outside each dwelling, the sunlight reflecting off the mosque's golden dome. Christians and

Muslims live side by side in relative harmony. The wife of the revered imam is chummy with a Christian woman; a beautiful Christian girl is betrothed from childhood to an adoring Muslim goatherd; a Christian boy teaches his Muslim friend to read and write. This mingling of religions and ethnicities reflected the larger tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. Of course, there were fault lines within the empire, and Eskibahce has its own fissures: a suspected adulteress is stoned in the town square; the local drunk incites a mob to assault an Armenian resident; an otherwise loving father forces his son to murder his pregnant (and unwed) sister. These barbaric acts disrupt the town's natural rhythms, but never to the breaking point. Only when war intervenes does everything fall apart. The Balkan wars are followed by World War I, and then by the devastating conflict between Turkey and Greece, which led to the expulsion of Turkish Christians to Greece and the parallel evacuation of Greek Muslims to Turkey. This is all documented in close detail. De Bernières has always been adept at juxtaposing brutality with episodes of high comedy or romance, and that's certainly the case here. But about midway through the book the scales tip toward the tragic and never tip back. World War I divides the young men of Eskibahce; Muslims are recruited to fight while their Christian counterparts are relegated to labor battalions. The novel's most illuminating section is a series of letters a young soldier named Karatavuk writes about the agonizing campaign at Gallipoli. De Bernières evokes the particular intimacy of this legendary battle, and he humanizes war without minimizing its horror. Australian soldiers fling not just bombs but gifts into enemy trenches, and the Turkish soldiers reciprocate in kind. On another occasion the enemies acknowledge one another by name while retrieving the dead from the battlefield. Plunked right in the middle of the proceedings is an extended chunk of quasi-reportage concerning Mustafa Kemal (later Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), the founder of the republic of Turkey. Kemal appears sporadically in the book's earlier pages, and there the juxtaposition of his story with that of his fictional counterparts creates a striking narrative tension. When he's given center stage, however, the novel's momentum flags -- these sections have the feel of a laborious history lesson.

''Birds Without Wings'' will not appeal to admirers of spare, economical prose. De Bernières favors ornate description. Sometimes the excess verbiage weighs the novel down; just as often, it gives it the pleasingly busy feel of a 19th-century classic (it's no surprise that de Bernières has cited ''War and Peace'' as a model for his work). And though he's given to making grand pronouncements about war and nationalism, he always makes sure that the political is personal. In the end, this is a book about mourning, about grief at the loss of a community where Muslims and Christians were more than neighbors, where the imam went out of his way to bless a Christian child and Christians prayed to the Virgin Mary for their Muslim brothers.