Book Review: The Dervish House

Ian McDonald

2010

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Dervish House is a near-futuristic, somewhat surrealistic tale set in Istanbul in 2027. It follows the concurrent and interconnected stories of several residents of a single apartment building—a converted former home of Sufi ascetics, or dervishes—over the course of several days.

In 2027, Istanbul is, as it is now, a global crossroads. It is a polyglot city, filled with people of many cultures. It is incredibly old and traditional, and yet also jumping breakneck into the future. And the various stories of the main characters reflect this diversity, blending hyper-futuristic technology with ancient spirits and centuries-old city infrastructure.

McDonald’s writing is smoothly-flowing and colorful, almost impressionistic, for the first two-thirds of the book, as he gives life and backstory and motivation to his characters and moves them into the first phases of their respective plots. The writing then becomes harder and more concrete for a time, as the various stories ramp up into faster-paced climactic activity, and then downshifts again as the plot lines approach resolution. Sometimes the swirling imagery and abstractions got to be a little too much for me, but, for the most part, McDonald’s style fits the settings and the pacing nicely.

The book is first set in motion when a suicide bomber blows herself up on a tram in a crowded square. One of the witnesses to the bombing is a boy, Necdet, who has been illegally squatting in a vacant room in the dervish house. Since he is on the questionable side of the law already, he hightails it away from the tram before the police nanobots investigating the accident can arrive and track him down.

Unbeknownst to Necdet, he is followed by nanobots anyway. But these nanobots belong to Can, another boy living in the dervish house. Can has a heart condition that could be set off by loud noises, so he lives all his days trapped in his room, walled off from the outside by noise-cancelling earplugs. But he has outside eyes and ears in the form of a toy, a set of BitBots, nanotech robots that can morph themselves into different animals—a snake, a rat, a bird, a monkey. He uses them to spy on the outside world, monitoring their audio and video feeds on his laptop.

Can is having his BitBots follow Necdet home from the tram bombing when he realizes that both his BitBots and Necdet are being followed by another robot. It is not a police robot; it is a robot of unknown origin. When Can’s BitBots try to evade it, it pursues them, and they lead it a merry chase over the Istanbul rooftops before finally getting it to crash into an alleyway.

Can has his BitBots inspect the robot wreckage and bring pieces home to him. He shows the pieces to his friend, Georgios, a middle-aged former economics professor also living in the dervish house apartments.

Georgios is pretty much the isolated Can’s only friend, and the only person who treats Can with respect (perhaps because, being a Greek man in Turkey, he relates to being estranged from society). It turns out that Georgios is also a former member of a radical activist movement and a current member of a secret anti-terrorist government think-tank. As soon as he sees the robot wreckage Can brings him, he realizes something big and very sinister is afoot.

Georgios’ suspicions are heightened further when, after the bombing, Necdet starts seeing spirits—really seeing them—djinn and karins and the Islamic Green Saint Hızın. This, coincidentally, makes Necdet super-useful to his brother who is trying to become a religious leader of a new tarikat, and gives Necdet a growing reputation as a religious seer.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on...

Ayşe, the owner of an antiquities shop in the dervish house, is recruited by a mysterious customer to find a legendary treasure: a Mellified Man, a man who was mummified in honey. The honey from such a coffin is reputed to have amazing healing powers. And one such mummy, thousands of years old, is rumored to have made its way to Istanbul. Tracking it down is a treasure hunt that takes Ayşe all over the city, opening her eyes to secret patterns in the original city infrastructure that only the truly alert can see;

And Ayşe’s husband Adnan, an oil trader, is planning a dicey money-making scheme to sell rights to gas pipelines in Iran that are technically illegal because they were irradiated decades earlier in a nuclear explosion;

And Leyla, another resident of the dervish house and a recent business school graduate, is working to get venture capital funding for her cousins’ nanotech startup. They have developed a technology that uses latent, non-coding DNA in the human body to carry information, like a cellular computer. This would let you store and recall every piece of information you amass; it would let you swap in whole new talents and skills instantly; it could enable brain-to-brain telepathy. Needless to say, this could change the world;

And everyone’s movements are observed by a group of older Greek men, friends of Georgios, who hang out at a tea house near the dervish house, and who spend most of every day doing nothing but gossiping about the goings-on of the residents. They seem to be just a group of lazy retired friends, but they really serve as a group narrator—literally, a Greek chorus?—for the reader: interpreting events for us, clarifying, explaining, and at the end, tying everything together in ways we can understand.

There is a lot to like about this book, and a few things to be irritated by. In general, it is a good multi-threaded detective story. It’s a bit like a treasure hunt, in which you gradually put together bits and pieces of the various story lines until they start making sense not only in themselves but also together.

The city itself, the people living in it, and its busy, vibrant, densely-populated atmosphere may be the best parts. I loved learning about Istanbul. And I always like it when I am so immersed in the language and culture of a book that by the end I am totally comfortable with concepts and pronunciations of words that were foreign to me before.

And McDonald exploits Istanbul beautifully. As I said earlier, his writing style is slow, disconnected, and sometimes almost dreamlike. He uses swirling, colorful imagery, and lush but at the same time somehow clear descriptions of locations, buildings, and natural features. Throughout it all you are always conscious of the global-warmed oppressive heat, always making everybody sweaty and itchy. Some of the images were beautiful, like this description of the Grand Bazaar:

Gold with silver; plaster-peeling domes. Yellow-roofed soks refuse to run true; every crossway reveals new alleys and corridors that slope unpredictably between coffin-tight shops and stalls before opening into dome-roofed plazas and bedestens. Tukish flags in all conceivable geometries. Red and white, crescent and star. No home for the starry coronet of the EU here. A painted finger-board points to a tiny mosque, tucked up a twisting flight of stairs. Men hurry high-stacked trolleys along the stone-flagged passages. Water spills down the tiled face of a fountain. Everything is very small, packed, wedged together. The shopkeepers are too big for their tiny stands, oppressed by their piled merchandise. The glare of white neon never changes by day or by night. The Grand Bazaar keeps its own time, which is time not marked by the world’s clocks or calendars. (p. 269)

                                                                                        

Like I said, most of the time it carried me along fine. Much of the time it was beautiful. Sometimes, though, it got to the point where I was frustrated by the incomplete sentences and the ephemerality and itched for something a little more solid.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that The Dervish House reminded me in many ways of Neal Stephenson’s books. For one thing, there’s the exotic location in a cosmopolitan international city, of which we get to see much of the seedy underbelly. There’s McDonald’s wry sense of humor, with his subtle pop culture references to Jack Bauer and Blue Steel, and his affectionately irreverent take on the sacred. And there is the near-futuristic nanotechnology with all kinds of uses: security enforcement, dynamic fabric decoration, smart newspaper pages, and stimulants. And Can’s doggedly loyal BitBots, which took the form of four animals and became his vehicles to wisdom, echoed little Nell’s four stuffed animal friends in The Diamond Age.