Of Miniatures and MurderOne of these days, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk will be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. As is usually the case with this prize, it will be given for all the wrong reasons: a Muslim may be needed that year or the clash of East and West may demand a winner who is from both cultures. That said, it will be an honour long overdue and richly deserved. For 20 years, Pamuk has been spinning his postmodern yarns in Istanbul and getting better with every book. In Turkey, he is a publishing sensation (after his latest book his publisher successfully sued a newspaper which refused to believe the sales figures) and his books have been translated into 20 languages. His latest effort My Name is Red is a magnificent historical mystery, which manages to be a thrilling page-turner as well as a dense novel of ideas.The book is set in Istanbul in 1591. The Ottoman Empire is a major superpower, perhaps the most powerful in the world, and the sultan has commissioned a new book of paintings. These are not just any paintings. They are to be rendered in the 'new' Venetian manner, a style that flies in the face of all the rules of Islamic miniature art. The book is so secret that even the miniaturists working on it are unaware of the whole picture. Only Enishte Effendi, the official supervising the book, knows how all the pieces will fit. But rumours of heresy and blasphemy swirl around the project and an extremist preacher, incensed at the new western influences, is preaching murder.When one of the miniaturists working on the book is killed, anyone could be the killer. Was he killed because he was committing heresy? Or because he had discovered heresy and was about to unmask the heretic? Enishte and his lovesick nephew 'Black Effendi' are racing to find the killer when another murder is committed. Meanwhile, there are other complications: Black Effendi is in love with Enishte's widowed daughter Shekure, who is also being pursued by her brother-in-law. She is flirting with both through a Jewess who carries her messages through the streets of Istanbul. And always in the background is the conflict between the self-contained and insular Islamic civilisation and the brash and uncomfortably individualistic new challengers from Europe.The book is written in the form of 59 short chapters, each a monologue by one of the characters. Most of the chapters are narrated by the central characters - Black Effendi, Enishte, Shekure, the miniaturists and so on - but several are unconventional. The opening chapter is narrated by a freshly killed corpse, while others are narrated by the picture of a dog, a horse and even the colour red, from which comes the title of the book. The multiple perspectives work very well as a murder mystery - the narration by the killer, for example, invites the reader to guess at his identity through his style - and help Pamuk to push his complex cultural debate much better than any single perspective could have managed.The amazing thing is that the book works at every level. As a murder mystery, it is thrilling and loaded with suspense, while as an allegory on the clash of cultures, it is masterful and subtle. Pamuk is far from being didactic or one-dimensional. The Ottoman world is indeed depicted as a despotic and insular culture, increasingly constrained and hampered by rigid and oppressive orthodoxies. But the orthodoxies have their own internal justifications and rationalisations. In a world where "the center will not hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world", these certainties do have an appeal. Pamuk is too much of a postmodern intellectual to actually embrace these ideologies but he is not above suspecting that in all this 'progress' something has also been lost. Not all the illusions are on Don Quixote's side, some are also on the side of those who jeer at him.In 1999, the Turkish government tried to give Pamuk the title of state artist, which he refused by saying: "For years I have been criticizing the state for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism, I don't know why they tried to give me the prize." After September 11, he wrote: "The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming humiliation experienced by most of the world's population, which they have to overcome without losing their common sense and without being seduced by terrorists, extreme nationalists or fundamentalists. Neither the magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm, nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manage to fathom this cursed private sphere."Near the end of the book, one of the miniaturists offers what could be Pamuk's own credo: "An artist should never succumb to hubris of any kind, he should simply paint the way he sees fit rather than troubling over East or West." Pamuk spent five years writing My Name is Red, one must spend a few days reading it. It will not be a disappointing experience.