The Dervish House

Winner of the BSFA and Campbell awards, Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House is also a nominee for this year’s Hugo awards, voting for which ends in just three days from now.  McDonald’s novels tend to be about the effect of advancing technologies on developing nations in near-futures and to employ, and this book is no different. Here is the description from Pyr, the publisher:

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shock waves from this random act of twenty-first-century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.

Welcome to the world of The Dervish House—the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union, a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million, Turkey is the largest, most populous, and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It’s a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and central Asia.

The Dervish House is seven days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core—the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself—that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama, and a ticking clock of a thriller.

Mysticism, fanaticism, obsession, greed, nano-technology, spybots, intrigue: McDonald’s book is a wonderful mix of elements that, instead of reading like a scattered mess, comes together to form a portrait of a future Istanbul as sprawling and finely detailed as the Arabic calligraphy that adorns the walls of the city’s holy edifices.  Istanbul itself is an eclectic mix of elements: former capital of the Byzantine Christian Empire and now a place where East and West, Christian and Muslim, traditional and cutting edge mix and clash amidst ancient edifices and a bustling, developing economy.  McDonald renders it beautifully in its many assets, so much so that it becomes the seventh central character of the book. I typically try to stay away from novels that follow the viewpoints of more than three central characters whose stories, though disconnected at the beginning, connect on down the line since I think it can run into severe issues with pacing and limited character development, but McDonald pulls it off with aplomb.

Spinning Up: Where The Dervish House Gets it Right

The action of the book takes place in Istanbul, Turkey (now part of the EU in the book), during the span of a week in the mid 21st century.  The book’s central characters live in or are connected to The Dervish House, an old place of study and sanctuary for Dervishes of the Sufi branch of Islam, now converted into apartment blocks.  First, we meet Necdet, a deadbeat slacker who happens to be present when a suicide bomber detonates her head on a public tram, killing no one else. Blood spattered and traumatized, Necdet begins to see spirits, djinn, and various signs and portents, which his brother Ismet, a small-time Muslim community leader, thinks may be useful to help reinforce and spread the faith.  We then meet Can, a boy with a heart condition that requires him to wear noise-dampening earplugs (lest a loud sound excite his heart into arrest) who observes the explosion, and indeed much of the outside world, through his BitBots, small robotic balls and particles that can align to form a monkey, snake, rat, or bird, and which Can, who sees himself as a boy detective, controls via remote to explore the world he is distanced from.  Next there is Georgios, a theoretical economist, forcibly retired professor, and member of a tiny community of Greeks living in Istanbul.  Adnan, a nano-head (someone who pumps nano-tech enhanced solutions to increase his mental acuity) and vicious market trader gearing up for the biggest, and riskiest, score of his life, doesn’t live in The Dervish House, but his life, Ayse, an antiquities dealer offered a million euro to locate a lost artifact (the Mellified Man), keeps her shop there.  Finally, we have Leyla, a young business graduate seeking to make it in the big city so she doesn’t have to return to her smothering family life back in tomato country, and who is also working on the deal of a lifetime.

Six stories and about 350 pages to give them all their share of plot and character development, and to my surprise McDonald pulls it off pretty well.  By chapter 3 or so I had a very clear idea of who each of these characters were: some I liked, some I didn’t, some I pitied, but all of them made a definite impression on me and felt like real people.  McDonald gives each one of them a pretty distinct set of hopes, dreams, backgrounds, fears, etc. It seems kind of contrived to have all these people, whose paths and adventures all intersect down the road already living or working in one building, but the characters themselves believable and sympathetic.  They have interesting development arcs and genuine emotional depth.  Even though the story is told in third-person, the writing itself still does a good job of giving a flavor of that character’s interior life.

In many ways, The Dervish House reads like a tried-and-true story of intrigue and mystery that can be enjoyed by SF fans and non-SF fans alike, and there’s an attention to the importance of architecture that at times makes it feel almost Dan Brown-ish, but this doesn’t mean the speculative elements aren’t there or aren’t important.  Adnan and his business buddies huff nano-enhanced concentration aides to help them keep up with the intelligences, artificial and human, that populate and manage the ever-shifting trading market.  The potentials of nano-technology, from its it’s potential as a bio-enhancer integrating body and computer to the risk of the “grey-goo” scenario in which self-replicating nano machines overtake everything, is a particularly important theme in the book.  The police make their presence known with flying swarmbots that ID people based on facial recognition and advanced pattern matching (they can ID you by the way you walk, for example).  Apparently they also vandalize neighborhoods that get a bit too uppity by spray painting their edifices, which I didn’t quite understand.  My favorite piece of technology is probably Can’s BitBots, which are intended as a kind of toy, which, while they certainly have their playful side, literally make surveillance and reconnaissance into child’s play.  He does everything with them from scare the neighbors with his snake, to outrun an aggressive robot with monkey and bird, to tailing bad guys with the rat, all from a computer terminal with a haptic field (controlled by touch).

The speculative elements of the story are like cyberpunk with an Eastern twist, but unlike classic cyberpunk with the oppressive or otherwise alienating effect of a large city, the city of Istanbul in The Dervish House becomes its own vibrant and endearing character as well.  McDonald establishes a palpable sense of wonder over the accomplishments of the old artificers who build and adorned the city, like the artists who painstakingly and precisely created the ornate tessellations and calligraphic patterns in Mosques  and other ancient buildings all over the city.  The precision and the artistry, the elaborate patterns underlying the city’s construction and the movements of its people (studies by one side-character who is a “psychogeographer”), all combine to make the city itself as much if not more of a marvel than the cutting-edge technology floating around it: a hot, sweaty, noisy marvel.  The city becomes as much a character, with its different neighborhoods and edifices defining its various facets and personalities, as the flesh-and-blood characters themselves.

In short, characterization, setting, and the integration of speculative technology and future history are all well crafted and well integrated in The Dervish House.

Spinning ‘Till Your Dizzy: Where The Dervish House Could Have Been Better

My primary complaint with this book is basically a complaint about this style of novel in general.  As mentioned earlier, The Dervish House uses multiple viewpoints of multiple characters, each with their own individual struggles and back stories, whose story arcs all intersect at different points in the novel.  In SF, this has been Gibson’s modus operandi since Neuromancer, and Guy Ritchie is known for using it in film ( in Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Rock ‘n Rolla).   One area where films like Ritchie’s have it all over books like McDonald’s and Gibson’s, however, is pacing.   Each chapter in McDonald’s novel includes at least one scene with each character, but not all scenes were of equal pacing or action: you might have a particularly tense scene with one character stop abruptly to show another character having coffee and talking with friends, or vice versa.   These transitions can be disorienting, especially since I often found myself wracking my brains to remember what the hell the characters were doing the last time I read about them, and early on I constantly confused one character with another.

I think Mcdonald could have gotten away with having one or two fewer characters, although it would be a hard choice to pick exactly who would end up on the chopping block.  Perhaps McDonald just got attached to the number 7: 7 days and 7 characters (if you count Istanbul itself as a character, and I think McDonald wants you to do that).  It makes a nice balance in theory, but in practice it’s got its problems.  McDonald pulls it off better than anyone I’ve ever seen, but I still felt like I was riding an oddly planned roller coaster:  sometimes a steep rise turns into a level ride instead of a rushing fall, sometimes the exhilarating fall lasts only a second, and sometimes it comes suddenly and without warning.  It really screws with your attempt to define any larger dramatic arc.  The setting is richly described and the plotting is tight without becoming too byzantine (pun intended), but I sometimes wondered if Mcdonald, like other authors who use this format,  just want to show off how smart they are by demonstrating how many plot threads they can introduce and weave together without tangling things up too badly, like a wicked game of cats cradle.  The switching could be irritating at times, and it made it feel like the overall arc and action of the book developed with glacial slowness at times, but that’s my only significant complaint about the book.

Queen of Cities, King of Books?  Concluding Thoughts.

The Dervish House won my admiration despite my general apprehension at it’s style.  It’ll ensnare you with its rich presentation of Istanbul and it’ll keep you entranced with its characters.  The technology, the culture, the setting, the characters dreams and desires: no one element overpowers the rest.  The plotting is tight, with enough twists and DUN DUN DUUUNN moments to keep you reading to see how it all turns out in the end.  It also has some important themes and ideas regarding East/West relations, which would make it a great conversation piece for international and cultural relations.  It would be pretty interesting  if this one won the Hugo, considering the themes of Eastern defiance of Western hegemony and exploitation present in both this book and one of last year’s winners, The Windup Girl.  All in all, it’s pretty clear why The Dervish House one won the BSFA and Campbell, and why it was a front runner for the 2011 Hugo.