Ismail Kadare’s novel, the Siege, is a plaintive, raw work of subdued historical realism. Starting with a slow burn at first, the reader is able to remain grounded to the historical setting by Kadare’s inclusion of plentiful detail of the day-to-day minutiae of maintaining a siege. Outside of the clear historical framework that the narrative exists within, Kadare manages to weave in a startlingly human tale of individuals caught up in the gravity of systems with their own logic and progression, against the pull of which they remain powerless. In this sense, the role of fate is present throughout the entirety of this surprisingly poignant look at human reality.
An impressionistic portrait of the murky moral waters that men swam in for much of human history, the Siege presents the problem of taking a fortified castle from the point of view of the aggressors, the Ottomans. Kadare intentionally places the narrative focus on the Ottoman side, with Albanian narrative progress occurring only at brief interludes between chapters. The vast majority of the novel is spent describing the goings-on of a handful of characters in the Ottoman camp. The protagonist is a sort of ersatz Herodotus in Ottoman dress, the stultified, uncharismatic Melva Çelabi, a chronicler sent to set down the events of the Siege into writing. The deuteragonist happens to be the man in charge of this mass of animated wills, wants, and needs whose circumstances led them, one way or another, into the Ottoman military machine, one Urgulu Tursun Pasha. And the tritagonist, and perhaps the most fascinating character, the Quartermaster General, equal parts mysterious and philosophical, uses Çelebi’s limited intellectual interests and political understanding as a sort of foil for his own philosophical whims and expatiations.
Although the Albanian defenders eventually triumph, by outlasting the Ottomans, there is nothing romantic in Kadare’s depiction of the months of grim violence that the Ottomans and Albanians inflicted on each other. If the reader wasn’t aware of the author’s geographic provenance, it would be hard to tell on which side the author’s sympathies lie—this is how honestly, unflinchingly, and humanly the Ottoman characters are written. If anything, because of the paucity of narrative attention placed on the plight of the defenders one could be forgiven for assuming the writer to be Turkish, if he had to be one or the other nationality. In achieving a large degree of historical authenticity, the author doesn’t sacrifice the quality of the characterization of the major players of the Siege, with a startlingly humanized portraiture of the militarized, oppressed, terrified ranks of the Ottoman Empire.
A sense of the unstoppable forward march of forces beyond human comprehension or control is present throughout, and one cannot help but observe that the characters, like Çelebi or Tursun Pasha, don’t seem to struggle much against their fates. The soldiers in the Sultan’s army don’t have much choice, in the same way that any human being finding themselves in a hierarchy where violence is the essential relational element has a compromised ability to choose their path. One cannot forget that the novel deals with a time when human destinies were almost always forced upon them. This makes the problem of assigning moral blame to the perpetrators of the violence that features so prominently throughout the Siege even more difficult; it isn’t enough to simply and lazily apply a universal condemnation of violence in any form, as though each and every actor in the Ottoman camp were acting on their own accord in everything they did; as though the Azabs wanted to climb the burning ladders again and again and have hot pitch poured on their heads and burn and die horribly. The perpetrators of the violence, in the case of the rank and file Ottoman soldiers, are also themselves victims of hideous violence.
One could argue that since the Ottomans are the ones attacking this fortress, and therefore the aggressors, they should not be considered victims for receiving the violence of defenders. This might be true for the commanders, but even then the truly responsible parties aren’t present at the scene of the battle; the Sultan and his divan back in Edirne are the ones who decided that these many thousands of men would die for nothing. It is, therefore, a complex task to make sound moral judgements when assessing the level of guilt of the various participants in the Siege. At the same time, these soldiers, the same Azabs who are so unjustly sent to their deaths time and again for the sake of taking the citadel, and others, are participants in the systematic rape and killing of captive Albanian women. There is no ambiguity or moral complexity here, this is simple, sheer barbarism. The author does not shy away from depicting the foulness human beings are capable of. There are parts of the book that are simply chilling in the juxtaposition they convey between the mellow, casual nature of the conversation between a group of friends drinking in the Ottoman camp, for example, including our chronicler, the milquetoast Thucydides, and then the same individuals discussing the way supply and demand applies to the village girls being used as human sex slaves. Everything, from the horrific to the prurient, is treated as equally mundane; Kadare doesn’t linger on the atrocities committed, everything is simply described, without exposition, moralizing, or any other incursion of the author’s sensibilities into the work.
In constructing the character of the Pasha, the author never gets into outright sympathetic territory. The Pasha always falls far short of decency, although he seems to exist more squarely within standard ethical parameters than the vast majority of his army. He is cold to his wives in the harem, treating them more like chattel than humans, and he remains consistently gloomy, surly, and short with his subordinates, although this last observation is far from unique for a military commander. He diverges from the common conception of a military general in one important respect, however. Generals, in the late medieval period and later, were typically men of major stature in the social structure, placed rather high up on the pyramid, and were therefore often insulated from the costs of war, including defeat, compared to their rank and file soldiers, whose blood was spilled regardless of the outcome of the battle. In the case of Tursun Pasha, the author made a deliberate choice to have his fate bound up with the result of the siege from the very beginning. For the Pasha the affair was all or nothing; either he would win the battle and return to Edirne to be rewarded with wealth and glory, or he would lose everything and be disgraced. In an interesting way, despite the obvious lack of even a hint of charm, warmth or likable traits, the Pasha’s dire situation puts him in an at least quasi-sympathetic light compared with the rest of the Ottoman cast. I found more to root for in the character of the Pasha, despite his presiding over a terrifying assemblage of bloodthirsty wretches, than the chronicler Çelebi, by leaps and bounds.
All that said, it is very much worth noting that, upon reflection, one finds nothing redeeming whatsoever about nearly any single character on the Ottoman side. There is legitimately almost nothing positive that one could say about a single one of them. Perhaps Çelebi is the least reprehensible given his lack of participation in either the murder or the rape that occurs throughout the events of the Siege, but even he is only sort of neutral at best. He witnesses countless episodes of stunning, caustic brutality and is never bothered more than when he feels he has committed some kind of impropriety or faux pas in the company of his social betters. However, the way that these characters are presented with their inner thoughts and motivations leaves their humanity on clear display for the reader; they aren’t painted as uni-dimensional villains. It would have been easy to write the Ottoman characters, most of whom regularly commit acts of barbarous cruelty, in such a way as to neglect their emotional complexity as characters. Kadare consistently employs enough nuance to make the Ottoman characters morbidly fascinating to watch. A view of the inevitable march of technological progress is presented in the dialogue between Çelebi and the Quartermaster General, one that alludes to the terrors of our own age, forming part of the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. However, the larger burden of the book seems to rest on simply showing how humans behave in war, how it debases and corrodes their spirits, how it reduces them to barbarity, and how, despite all of this, they return again and again like moths to flames, to sow chaos and destruction at the behest of remote leaders and functionaries.
A fictional account of the protracted siege of an Albanian mountain fortress by marauding Ottoman ghazis, the work avoids any quaint massaging of the Albanian national spirit in its dealings with the Balkan nation’s national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti—Skanderbeg. While readers might expect Skanderbeg to take a more prominent role in the story that unfolds throughout the three hundred pages of Kadare’s novel, the author’s decision to limit his involvement in the events to little more than allusions and brief mentions almost has more impact than if he had written him in as a main character. While never actually appearing as a character in the novel, the fearsome reputation of the commander who harassed and defeated the Ottoman army all over the Balkans paid dividends for the defenders of the fortress in the Siege. One doesn’t get a sense of the themes of either national mythos or the resilience of the Albanian people occupying the fore in the Siege, which is noteworthy given the ease with which the tale could have slid into proverbial pandering to nationalist sentiments.
Kadare’s portrayal of the Ottoman characters, who are foregrounded in the book’s narrative, is at once nuanced, honest, and fair in its depiction of the actions of struggling masses of hierarchically organized humanity. Preoccupations with the logistical necessities of a prologued military action such as a siege are clear throughout. One can dismiss previous romantic or fanciful visions of what a siege consists of, minute to minute, hour to hour and so on. There are accounts to settle, budgets to balance, dead to bury, food and supplies to procure, systems of hygiene to institute, and more solidly unsexy aspects of siege warfare to expand upon. Kadare blends the historical foundation with the character-driven narrative progression in an adroit synthesis of world-building and pathos.
“Those among the council members who were familiar with administrative accounts realized that the secretary was making his quill squeal more than was actually necessary. To judge by the serious face he made at such times, it wasn’t hard to guess that these silent pauses in which his pen scratching was the overriding sound gave him his sole opportunity in life to assert his own importance. Once someone started talking again, his very presence would be forgotten (201).” This is a perfect example of the space and effort Kadare dedicates to humanizing even the most minuscule characters that appear, even if only in a scene or two, throughout the book. He is driven to catalogue the small preoccupations, motivations, and characteristics of the fleeting extras that dot the pages. All this detail and attention paid to sometimes inconsequential characters helps to create a narrative richness and believability; a sense of authenticity.
The blind poet, Sadedin, about whom a comparison to Homer is made partway through the book, muses cryptically about the futility and sadness about the world later on in the novel. “What is there to see in the world?” “An orphanage for fallen stars and nothing else!” (283) This quote seems to encapsulate the central thrust of the novel almost more than any other; the hopeless, doleful tone of the continued assault of the exhausted attackers combined with the succession of terrible events leading up to the final defeat of the Ottoman engine of war (by a symbol of nature, rain) creates an impression of a world hunched over with pain. There is a deep, persistent sadness echoing throughout this whole work. The Albanians defenders hold off the attackers, but it is known by both parties that the sieges will resume the following year, as though there is some providential teleology being played out again and again. None of the players rejoice in the roles they’ve been given, nothing is glamorized or painted in romantic tones, there also is very little hope on the side of the Ottoman camp. A fatalism permeates the whole of the story, underwritten by the philosophical musings of the Quartermaster General, whose commentary lurches between the ontological and the topical. This novel is for people who not only love history, but also love humanity in all its hope, despair, ugliness, and its many shades of grey.
THE CONVERSATION PIECE 