Snowstories

The white stuff might seem to be all that connects Orhan Pamuk's dizzyingly rich tale of fundamentalism in Kars, eastern Turkey

and Janne Teller's adult fairy story with a dark core.

But an underlying seriousness of intent and contemporary/timeless commentary underlies both books. They are Snow - the Turkish word, kar, gives an extra layer of wordplay alongside the name of the town and the abbreviation of the protagonist's name Ka - and Odin's Island. Ostensibly the richer, because of its complicated layers, is Pamuk's masterpiece (or one of them - I've quite a few of his still to read).

The framework is semi-playful: Ka is supposed to be the friend of the author, who refers to himself as Orhan, tells us that his hero's key work is a book of poems which has been lost - I was amused to see a critic complain of this as a shortcoming - and takes the liberty of leaping back and forth between Ka's time in Kars and his two spells in Germany. Still very curious how to disentangle fact from fiction, but the internet is no help. Humour is sometimes there in the narrative, too, though it always turns to a heart of darkness.

Nothing is quite what is seems, not idealism, so-called fundamentalism, love, hatred. We have some unlikely revolutionaries in a theatrical couple whose aim is to stage an English classic with a spine-chilling denouement, a poet who pretends to be a reporter and whose ability to see many sides of an argument leads to fatal compromise, love-object sisters who are not quite what they seem. It's a page-turner with plenty of compelling digressions; it speaks both of Turkey's fatal split between those who look west and others who want to preserve Islamic roots. And on it goes, with the latest news the attacks of Erdoğan's right-wing press on Pamuk and Elif Shafak as 'western stooges'.I was going to quote, but it's nearly Christmas and more remains to be done.

Likewise with Teller's Odin's Island. It starts and ends as a Christmas story, with the old chief god lost and forgetful on a Utopian northern island, trying to cope with a reindeer's broken leg. Grown-ups might think this is child's stuff, but when Odin walks across the frozen sea to the troubled mainland, a fantasy with parallels to the Götterdämmerung that is Norse mythology's Ragnarok unfolds compellingly. In between the prologue and epilogue comes the chronicle of an eventful year, presumably the eve of the new millennium, which is when the book was published.

Teller has pure fun as well as tragicomedy with the religious factions who take Odin as a new Messiah (or not). Her semi-mythic boat people are fascinating, too; though the book keeps its feet on the ground with its torn heroine. And the island of the mysterious disappearing act(s) is the other main character. Again, further description would spoil the plot. A thoughtful book to read as we move into what may be the darkest year, at any rate in my life. Good, then, to end with a poem reproduced in full online by the admirable Sam West, Hardy's The Darkling Thrush. The photograph is by Andreas Eichler of Mannheim.

I leant upon a coppice gate

      When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

      The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

      Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

      The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

      The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

      Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.

I wish us all some measure of how that 'blessed Hope' may come to pass.

Writer as prophet: Janne Teller and Philip K Dick

Janne Teller wrote the first version of War, her razor-sharp imagining of - in its latest, English-language incarnation - Brits as refugees forced to flee a devastated London for sanctuary in Egypt, as If the Nordic countries were at war in 2001. It might have seemed prophetic, but Denmark was already turning its back on compassion for immigrants, and besides, Teller herself comes from a family of Austrian/German refugees.

The point being, I suppose, that writers who seem so prophetic are simply aware of the eternal values and predicaments, history repeating itself or at least rhyming. It's not, in my opinion, their place to examine the causes. One person in the very interesting and distinguished company Janne's and our mutual friend Marianne had assembled for Sunday brunch and a reading raised that aspect, and it's true that there are different kinds of writers who combine fiction with polemical journalism.

But the imagination must have its free rein in selecting what it thinks is pertinent, and Teller has done that so powerfully in the other myths she's created (I've already written here about Nothing, which I was inspired to buy at Glyndebourne following the Youth Opera's extraordinary work on a project derived from it, and I'm currently spellbound in the middle of Odin's Island, where Teller raises questions about dogmatic religions and politics in the imagined face of the old god coming back to earth as a wizened, forgetful little old man).

War is not so much a myth as a what if? miniature masterpiece. It's so short and to the point that I might dent it by quoting or evoking; suffice it to say that it makes you face all the realities of, say, Syrian refugees by applying them to yourself. As Teller writes in her afterword, 'it becomes about the definition of self, both for the ones who arrive as strangers as for the ones who receive the strangers'. The presentation, as a sort of EU passport with very singular illustrations by Helle Vibeke Jensen, pushes boundaries in book production, too. I'd like to see the many other versions in different languages. Each must be specially tailored to the country in question's circumstances. What was she like to meet? Absolutely natural, curious and gracious, everything you would expect.

I turned to Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle because I wanted to follow up Philip Roth's The Plot Against America with another vision of an American dystopia. Little did I know what a remarkable exercise in literary style I was going to find. Like Kurt Vonnegut in his so-called Science Fiction books, Dick has been pigeonholed in a way that would seem to stop him being acclaimed as one of the best writers of all time.

So here, too, it's not just the imagination or the prophecy; the sheer humanity of Dick's complex characters makes this as heartwrenching a novel as Roth's, and much closer to what may happen in America with Trump's advent (if it ever gets to him becoming President - one begins to have hopeful doubts of the kind that have proliferated with the Brexit quagmire).

Not that the parallels of the actual situation are as close. San Francisco sits within the Japanese sphere of influence, a much better alternative to the Nazi zone which includes New York. Nevertheless so much in each character's stream of consciousness is pertinent to now, like when the double agent Baynes aka Wegener reflects on the fellow German with whom he is travelling (with apologies for filleting; it's all good):

Am I racially kin to this man?...So closely that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic  world we live in. The madmen are in power...

But he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? i feel it, see it, but what is it?

He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing....

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk, Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honour; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte; but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life...

They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off.

And so on. Not everything here applies to Trump, I know. But it's all good, even when Dick is at his most freewheeling. And he tells a taut story which eventually becomes a thriller, interweaving the lives of the five main characters and giving the only woman independence of spirit (not bad for 1962). Cleverest of all, perhaps, is the idea of the novel-within-the-novel, the 'Man in the High Castle' Hawthorne Absensen's vision of an alternative reality which corresponds in many respects, though crucially not all, to what actually happened after the Second World War. Dick not only 'quotes' from the book but uses it as a tool of hope - the power of the spoken word to kindle a resistance.

The ending is deliberately left open, so that the novel lives beyond its physical duration. Even so, I'm not going to watch the TV series, which seems from a resume to be rather loosely based on the book in the first place. 20 episodes down and another series about to be released? Doesn't look right to me. The Ur-text's the thing.

In another connection, take a look at what I've written about Péter Esterházy's text for his friend Péter Eötvös's Halleluja - Oratorium Balbulum over on The Arts Desk. The two pictured above in their only photographed meeting in March this year - Esterházy died in July just before Halleluja's world premiere - by Szilvia Csibi for Müpa Budapest. Two more prophets, then, who know about the laws of recurrence.