A shattered peace between Muslims and Christians

That twist turns fathers against daughters and husbands against wives, slicing through ligaments of affection in one haunting chapter after another. With his presentation of this ecumenical community, de Bernières suggests that these eruptions of domestic violence - tragic as they are, motivated by pride and religious absolutism - can be controlled and minimized by the essential goodwill of reasonable people who know one another well.

But "Birds Without Wings" maintains a bifocal vision. One eye stays focused on the village, while the other sees nations foolishly slipping toward World War I. Among the scenes of life in little Eskibahçe, de Bernières interjects blood-soaked snapshots of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the chaotic ascension of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey. With wry disgust, he races through revolutions and counterrevolutions, massacres and deportations, the craven interference of European powers and their disastrous passivity, atrocities reflected endlessly in the mirror of revenge.

It's often difficult to follow the swift crosscurrents of this complex period, but de Bernières's thesis is strikingly clear: "History," he writes, "is finally nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from hacked flesh in the name of great ideas."

Eventually, of course, obscurity can protect Eskibahçe no longer. The rabid demands of fanatics who know nothing of this delicate town rain down upon it, fertilizing sectarian strife that these people had managed to hold in check for centuries. Again and again, we see the way reckless acts by vain leaders function as the flutterings of that proverbial butterfly that incites a hurricane far away. Friend is set against friend, neighbor against neighbor, always against their true will. With his unfailingly wise perspective, de Bernières notes, "The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race."

Karatavuk, one of the Muslim boys who played so happily with his Christian friend, takes us into the smoke of trench warfare with all its ghastly farce and startling moments of compassion. His burning faith in the jihad is slowly smothered by the senseless horrors he witnesses and commits. "It is only people like me," he writes, "who wonder why God does not do just one good miracle, and make the world perfect in an instant."

So much is remarkable about this novel, from the heft of its history to the power of its legends. In this great bazaar of family life and international politics, the bittersweet metaphor of "birds without wings" grows deeper and richer. The people of Eskibahçe are blessed with soaring aspirations, but like all of us they must live firmly on the ground, forced to cope with one another and the earthquakes of history. This epic about the tragedy of borders is likely to cross all borders, moving readers everywhere as it describes the harrowing cost of remaking faraway places in the image of our dreams.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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