What we have here is failure to tell Professor White the truth about her book. Some editor should have taken her aside and said: "Look, you can have have tons of characters and give them all confusing-to-remember names, you can switch between the past and the present, you can tell your story in non-linear fashion, you can switch between using the past tense and the present tense, you can switch up the voice of the narrator between several people, or you can always keep us guessing as to who is actually speaking, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT DO ALL OF THEM AT ONCE IN THE SAME SHORT BOOK."What we also have here is failure to communicate. Because, as much as I wanted to like this book, and as much as I think Professor White has a real gift for description, the book is WAY too confusing. A too-complicated style can really make a mystery bomb. After all, no one is reading Agatha Christie because of her unique way of creating page-long run-on sentences. That's why we read Agatha Christie for fun when we are supposed to be writing essays about the innovative literary stylings of William Faulkner. We want to find out whodunit, goddamnit. And the format of The Sultan's Seal creates such chaos that the mystery loses steam while you're trying to figure out what the hell the author is talking about. And the story moves along at a tragically lethargic speed. I mean, Great Scott, THERE'S BEEN A MURDER! There should be some more urgency to this story. Instead it feels like the characters are drifting slowly along. Also, although the main characters are likable enough, they seem way too dumb to be crime-solving gumshoes. Usually, it's the criminal mastermind that accidently blurts out how he did it, and we can all laugh about how stupid HE is, rather than the other way around. Sigh. Sybil is, in particular, especially moronic at times, and it's super annoying. Also...and this is just one person's opinion...the resolution of the mystery sucks. And that really IS criminal.
For the first 3/4s of the book this was an elegant mystery, rich in cultural and historical detail. At the end, however, the author chose to pile on the action and everything seemed to be happening at once, not always in a coherent fashion. If it wasn't for that I would have liked to rate this book higher. Jenny White has written numerous non-fiction works on Turkish politics and society, so I expected a lot of cultural and historical detail, and I certainly wasn't disappointed on that score. I did enjoy the description of the customs and mores of 19th century Turkey, the characters were interesting and believable, with the main character, Kalim Pasha, cutting a particularily dashing figure. The book is told from 3 different perspectives, which worked extremely well for me. I was disappointed to find that there was no glossary, which would have been helpful, given the amount of Turkish words used, although of course one could guess most of them. I'll be reading the next book in the series.
Do You like book The Sultan's Seal (2007)?
I read this for my "Global Whodunits" book group at Primary Source. This one immerses the reader into the dangerous final days of the Ottoman Empire (1880's) in Istanbul. This was a period of great court intrigue and multi-ethnic unrest as the ideas and ideals of European nationalism swept into the empire. Kamil Pasha is the detective called upon to investigate the murder of an Englishwoman, and he quickly links this to an earlier, similar, unsolved case. The case gains intrigue and a sense of danger when Kamil discovers that both women wore a pendant created by a court jeweler (who ends up mysteriously dead, too) with a tugha--the Sultan's seal and Chinese calligraphy of an obscure Qing poem. Kamil has to balance his investigation so as not to offend either the British diplomats who are assisting him or the nervous Ottoman officials. While the story and mystery were captivating, as was the feel of the city and all its settings, I found this book to be a bit confusing. Parts were written in present tense, which I found quite off-putting as a reader, and there was one narrative "voice" that I still cannot place. I guess I will have to ask Jenny White when she meets with the group in December!
—Jennifer
The Sultan's Seal is the first in a trilogy set in the late 1800's in Istanbul with Magistrate Kamil Pasha investigating the murder of a young woman. Author Jenny White is a professor of anthropology at Boston University. I've read the other two already. I am giving this book 4 stars because of its fit within the trilogy although it is not nearly as satisfying as the other two books.The character of Kamil Pasha is a complex and intriguing one in the full trilogy but less fleshed out in The Sultan's Seal. In this book, I learned that Turkey/Anatolia was changing into a more westernized court system. Kamil Pasha had gone to England for a year to study law and was one of the first of the new Magistrates in Istanbul. White emphasizes the clash between the traditional police/court systems of Istanbul and the Magistrate system in the plot of this book.
—Elizabeth Sulzby
I thought I'd read this one years ago when it was first released, and I also also remembered having enjoyed it, but I think I must have been sleeping through it back then. It took me a while to track down the name, put it back on my list, and repurchase it -- this time on Kindle. I had remembered only tiny slivers and it makes me wonder if I had skipped to the end, which I almost never have done. Anyway, it was a fun read, despite the annoyance of Kindle Fire's default dictionary, which had very few of the (many) Turkish terms in this historical whodunit.
—Judith
