Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak had been on my reading list for more than a year, but the book of hers that came to me courtesy of my son was The Island of Missing Trees. Telling me that it was magical, he urged me to drop everything else to read it.
Having recently finished The Overstory by Richard Powers, I didn’t think another novel could move and impress me in the same way, but from the first to the last page of The Island of Missing Trees, I was entranced. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, after all, Shafak, who writes in both Turkish and English, has written twelve novels and won many literary prizes and considerable acclaim. She’s a marvelous storyteller, a master of pace and detail who seamlessly merges individual lives with external events; her prose is full of wisdom and intelligence.
Set in England and Cyprus, the novel is, as Shafak notes in a message to readers, “a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination.” Much of the narrative is told from the point of view of a fig tree, a Ficus carica and Cyprus native, a cutting of which was smuggled to England by Kostas and Defne and given a second life.
By the time this happens, however, this tree and this couple will have experienced pain and torment that is both personal and collective.
Kostas is Greek, Defne Turkish. When they meet as teenagers, Cyprus hasn’t completely descended into civil war or been partitioned, but warning signs and rising tension are inescapable. Seeing one another requires intrigue and subterfuge, the cover of night and the complicity of Defne’s sister, Meryem. When this becomes too risky, Yiorgos and Yusuf, the owners of a tavern called The Happy Fig, provide the young lovers with refuge. Yiorgos and Yusuf, a Greek and a Turk, know something about forbidden love.
The fig tree from which Kostas took a cutting once stood in the center of The Happy Fig, its crown poking through the roof. From this vantage point it bears witness, communicates with insects, and makes observations about the humans who frequent the place. Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Maronites, UN soldiers and tourists, a true Cyprus melting pot. Between the walls of The Happy Fig, “strangers turned into friends, friends into lovers,” sins and secrets were confessed, differences settled. Until war upended society, turning neighbors — fellow islanders — into enemies, the tavern was a joyous place, a reliable refuge.
Young love is powerful but not impervious to the chaos of ethnic prejudice and civil war, or the challenge of time and distance. When for his own safety Kostas is sent to England to stay with his uncle, he doesn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Defne, nor does he know that before he sees her again many years will pass. As Kostas learns, those intervening years scarred Defne in more ways than one; she carries the heavy burden of trauma along with an implacable sense of justice.
Defne understands the aftermath of civil war better than Kostas, not only because she lived it, but through her work with a group whose mission is to identify the remains of victims. The work is slow and painstaking, hazardous to the soul. Sorrow seeps into Defne’s being, the pain becomes part of her flesh and even when she and Kostas move to England and have their daughter, Ada, she can never fully escape it. Defne reminds us that some casualties of war go unnoticed and uncounted.
This beautifully told story always comes back to love, and that means back to the fig. Always the fig. The fig tree is a survivor, knowing yet humble, the tree of love lost, regained and buried in the earth.
