Memed, the Brigand Leader

More and more translations of European novels are coming ,n to the British market and the best of them are very good indeed, n the last few years we have had Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago ,nd Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and now the same lublisher has produced Yashar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk —a Turkish novel.

I7EMAL, who is not yet 40, was IV born in Southern Anatolia, and t is this harsh and rugged country ide which supplies the background or this, his first novel. His second las just been published in Turkey, md hasn’t yet been translated. But ipparently his second book is also rery successful, and Kemal is now teing discussed as a Nobel Prize vinner. On the strength of Memed, Hy Hawk, he certainly has the mak ngs.

Young Memed, the son of a poor vidow, rebels against his life of iervitude under the yoke of a brutal md ignorant Agha—or lord—of five small villages in the Anatolia Highl ands. The Agha virtually owns the jeople in the villages, too, and under :he feudal system which he imposes )n them, they occasionally starve to ieath, if they have not already been trampled to death by some of the Agha’s henchmen. The people put up with it, as they always have. Genera tions of servitude have given them no spark of courage. They continue year after year handing over the larger portion of their grain harvest to the Agha, merely because he is the Agha.

As young Memed grows older, he is driven to desperation by this kind of persecution, and finally to save his life after he has annoyed the Agha, he takes to the mountains with a band of brigands. From there he wages his own kind of war against the overlord —first to protect his mother and the girl to whom he is betrothed, and finally in open rebellion against the kind of tyranny under which his fellow villagers suffer.

Left to his own devices, young Memed would like to play the role of Robin Hood, for he certainly has n o argument with his fellow peasants.

But no man is an island, and Memed, in the rough and ready fashion of the hills, finds that his initial allegiance must be given to a brigand leader aptly named Mad Urdu—a colourful character capable of winning the Turkish equivalent of the VC, yet with absolutely no sense.

Mad Urdu thinks nothing of forming through a hail of bullets,

or of taking on the police in a run ning gun battle, but he wins himself no friends with his habit of robbing both rich and poor and of stripping those he robs down to, and includ ing, their underpants. It’s a fetish with Mad Urdu that he take their underpants. As he explains to more than one irate traveller left naked

on the open road, anybody can rob, but only Mad Urdu goes to the trouble of taking their underpants.

It’s Urdu’s trademark.

It was inevitable that young Memed and Mad Urdu would eventually part, and from there onwards the novel builds to its climax, as Memed realises he must settle accounts with the Agha. Memed’s name spreads throughout the country as a brigand leader of notorious skill—a brigand who watches over the interests of the poor like a hawk.

The people in this book are real people. To his cost, Memed finds time and again that the very people he is attempting to help free them selves from feudalism are those first to condemn him when the going gets tough. (MEMED, MY HAWK. Published by Collins-Harvill. 22/6.)