In his story of Art E H Gombrich juxtaposed Durer's fifteenth century print of a rhinoceros with a modern photo of an adult African rhino. His point was that the Durer image had become iconic in the true sense of the word. For centuries it dominated to the point of control how people inwardly saw the animal, since its characteristics were so often copied by others. Durer's animal is a stubby, scaly brute, apparently assembled by a demented saddle-sewer with a mission to use all his off-cuts, the overall impression being that of a stitched football with legs. The African rhino, of course, has little hint of section in its hide, which is, from the safety of distance, smooth all the way from front to back. For many years, perhaps, artists never bothered - or perhaps never had the chance - to draw rhinos from life, so Durer's iconic image came unquestioningly and authoritatively to the fore. One must presume that Durer's original was either stuffed - and hence genuinely sewn together, or, more probably, was a Javanese rhino brought to Europe by a European adventurer.
In My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the studios and daily lives of painters, artists, perhaps, whose assumptions about appearance determine what they paint and how they represent it. These illustrators are in the pay of the great Sultan, ruler of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the sixteenth century. The Sultan has commissioned a new book and his artists are at work embellishing its pages with their designs. But there is a private war of sorts in the studio. It's all a matter of style, of tradition versus modernity, of piety versus pride, conflicts over how things ought to appear.
There are masters of the old school who know that a horse should be painted in this way or that. Subjects of course ought to be sized by their importance, and attempts at realism are blasphemous, since in copying creation the artist is trying to imitate God. And then there are others, influenced by the Franks and Venetians in the West. They want to depict the reality they see in a palette that flatters and excites. An ideological battle is being fought, but its pitch is unclear, since He who commissioned the works is now only allowing each artist to see his own contribution, the rest kept hidden from view. So how can each artist know how his own work will appear and thus be understood?
And alongside this simmering dispute, there is the fate of the beautiful Shakare. She is related to some of the masters and is a young wife with two sons whose father went to war and never returned. A suitor arrives. Can she marry him? There are rules and traditions to observe. But can a married woman divorce a husband who might still be alive? My Name Is Red thus deals implicitly with ideological, religious, aesthetic and indeed political dispute. Which force will prevail - continuity or change, orthodoxy or modernity? And can the protagonists on either side legitimately claim right or righteousness? And what of an individualistic woman trapped by others' expectations and social taboos?
My Name Is Red becomes much more than a mystery to solve the two murders that form the backbone of its plot. It is also much more than the love story of Shekure and Black. It is a complex allegorical examination of culture and religion, conformity and change. It shows how the feudal mind seeks the solace of subservience, how the modern concept of individuality can be a dangerous challenge. And, by examining several characters' points of view, all of them in the first person, it involves the reader in moral dilemmas that otherwise would be difficult to appreciate. My Name Is Red is a great novel, an illuminating picture of an unfamiliar historical culture's mores, but these convolutions are surely more than relevant today.
Philip Spires
Author of Mission and A Fool's Knot, African novels set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk/
Migwani is a small town in Kitui District, eastern Kenya. My books examine how social and economic change impact on the lives of ordinary people. They portray characters whose identity is bound up with their home area, but whose futures are determined by the globaised world in which they live.