The Peace Machine

July 15, 2020
The 1903 assassinations of the king and queen of Serbia serve as an unstable anchor for Turkish journalist Mumcu's debut novel. The picaresque, frequently violent tale follows Istanbul street urchin Celal through his adoption by a rich exporter and then, after a stint of high school in Marseille, into a lucrative career as a writer of French pornography. He gets caught up in a complicated plan to deploy a "peace machine," which will somehow use "electromagnetism" to bypass free will and block "those waves spread in the soul by wickedness and cruelty." Serbia being a hot spot in need of pacifying, the group, which now includes seductive and gabby illustrator C�line, heads to Belgrade, where they trick melancholy Lt. Dragan into joining their effort, and set up an enormous circus that will be used to implement the machine. As history suggests, the plan fails, but the group is undeterred and determines to try again elsewhere. The novel is heavy on philosophical dialogue, but because the characters all sound the same and share the same basic points of view, it doesn't advance the plot. Mumcu also inserts a play and several short stories into the novel, which drag the action to a halt. When a new character, such as Dragan, is introduced, the author backtracks for many pages to recount his biography, even though the character is not going to play a significant role. Casual and often brutal death is omnipresent in the story, with characters being dismissed in a sentence or two, which may represent Mumcu's cynical attitude toward human progress but can be disconcerting to the reader. An overwrought, poetic ending seems out of step with the rest of the novel. A frustrating approach to a potentially fascinating topic.

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