The Gilded Cage on the Bosphorus
Set in the Çırağan Palace in Istanbul in 1903-1905, this novel, written by a direct descendant, chronicles the lengthy gilded imprisonment and aftermath of the death of the deposed Sultan Murad V, an urbane, enlightened, and cultured man usurped by his conservative younger brother. Beyond the palace’s walls the Ottoman empire gradually crumbles, encroached on by Imperial Russia.
A highly ritualised life, especially around the birth of a child, co-exists with an interest in Paris fashions on the part of the ladies of Murad’s extended family, and the reading of the latest Sherlock Holmes story. Murad reflects on world events like the signing of the Entente Cordiale, the oddity of a British monarchy that is anything but British, and recalls dancing a quadrille with a daughter of Queen Victoria. He treats a nervous breakdown with Veuve Clicquot. The novel is also thronged with faithful retainers; one elderly eunuch is a particularly intriguing character who probably deserves a novel to himself.
We learn more about the characters’ roles in history than we do about them as individual people, which can sometimes make them hard to distinguish one from the other, making the family tree provided useful and necessary. Osmanoğlu says in her preface that what she has written is ‘neither an historical novel, nor an academic study – it seems to me to sit somewhere in between!’ This is a richly woven carpet of a book but sometimes, due to extended explicatory passages, it does indeed read more like a history book than a novel.
