Book review: Men Alone by Özgür Uyanik

Jon Gower

Masculinity is the theme of this engaging and cosmopolitan collection of short stories, which examines men and their testosterone-fuelled ways in a slew of locations, from Cardiff to Istanbul, through Lisbon and Odesa to London and Paris.

Some stories focus on rituals and rites of passage, such as ‘The Cut’ which details a nine-year old’s circumcision and ‘His Father’s Voice’ which chronicles a son’s return home to Turkey, to the courtyard of a mosque in Ankara to bury his father.

Some of the masculinity in ‘Men Alone’ is exaggerated, as if seen through a Hollywood lens, such as that in ‘The Lone Wolf’ which trails after the inscrutable assassin Sedat, as he goes on assignment.

This has got the trappings of a movie, such as the fateful gun strapped to the underside of a toilet cubicle and the reader is therefore duped into thinking he knows the story’s direction of travel, that is until the killer sees someone who looks exactly like him and we are firmly in doppelganger territory. There’s a real sense of the visual in play in many of the tales and it comes as no surprise to learn that the author is also a film director.

Isolated males

While, as befits the book’s title, many of the characters in this story are isolated, solitary males there are some stories where such men are thrown together. One such is ‘Daybreak in the Land of the Photoshopped Soldier’ which chronicles a pared-down version of National Service in which Turkish nationals living abroad come home for three weeks of basic training at an army barracks.

In this tale four men bond together as they undergo the physical rigours and humiliations of being part-time soldiers. They even get an opportunity to capture the experience in commemorative photographs. For these they ‘would select a computer generated background from dozens of templates taped to the wall of a studio with each one given a code.

For example, E24 was a tank battalion under brooding grey clouds split by lightning bolts, T12 was a romantic scene under a gushing waterfall at sunset, and P27 featured rugged cliffs and a magnificent golden eagle.’ But the reality of the conscript’s life is far from romantic, especially for anyone who ventures into the nearby brothels or challenges the warrant officers whose job it is seemingly to humiliate their temporary charges.

Enjoyable

Much as the invention on display in these stories is enjoyable it’s the atmosphere and sense of place that allows some of them to properly lodge in the mind. ‘London to Paris’ is a lover’s tale set mainly in the French capital and we get the brown and orange chestnut leaves on the river embankments, breakfasts of croque monsieurs and coffee on little metal trays with the pitcher of water and a citron pressé each’ in a cafe that has served Steve McQueen and Jean-Paul Sartre.

There’s lots of such felicitous detail, conjuring into being the city of Odesa, with its Soviet-era red and cream streetcars and a funfair’s ‘skeins of electric lights, the cross-hatching of the shadowy streets and the dark lacuna of a silent sea beyond.’

Cinematic

And in the case of Istanbul, which supplies the backdrop to more than one story we get the tourist’s city – the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia but also places where the city’s deep history is exposed and a dreamer such as Murat, on whom the story called ‘Heartquake’ hinges, can view the great cinematic sweep of the city’s past, before hominids first walked the hills through the establishment of Constantinople to the present day concrete jetty of Karaköy ‘where the smell of grilled mackerel fills his nostrils.’

Sudden shock

The occasional story ends a little too abruptly, although a sudden shock of an ending works to the advantage of the one story set in Wales. In ‘Banter’ a student, Onur, takes a menial job to pay his fees and has to suffer the indignities of working for Kevin, a boss with an easily bruised ego.

He also has to deal with the threat of violence from a racist contractor called Gareth, ‘ a tanned bodybuilder with dark pitiless eyes,’’a hulking vat of repressed rage and a dangerous thug.’ It is almost impossible for Omur to tread carefully enough around this man and his naked anger and when the violence does come it comes as a single blow and as final as a fateful full stop.

Men Alone: Stories by Özgür Uyanik is published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.