So many of the people who might be able to offer enlightenment — be they local residents, or migrants to Istanbul or Germany — are consciously or unconsciously hiding truths: about themselves and their family histories, as well as more public events. For example, some Armenians who escaped in 1915 were re-socialised as Turks or Kurds, without entirely losing their genetic memory. This has odd effects on the way such people, and their descendants, think and talk; this book analyses those effects shrewdly but not unkindly.

Indeed, the best thing about the book is the intelligence with which the author deconstructs all the private and public myths that seem to be haunting his interlocutors, including the various servants of the Turkish state who take it upon themselves to set him straight about their country’s history.

Many of his official informants assume that a person of Anglo-Saxon appearance, speaking fluent Turkish, must belong to the long line of spies and troublemakers who have meddled in this part of the world on behalf of perfidious Albion. The reader is not invited to mock or despise these envoys of the state. On the contrary, the feeling is that for all the peculiar and indeed downright wrong things they believe, such people have their own particular integrity.

As an account of the way truth is constructed by communities and families living in a state of war and fear, “Rebel Land” ranks in sophistication with any primer of postmodern philosophy or social anthropology. It is also far more gripping, not least because it is told in the vulnerable but never self-indulgent voice of somebody who loves this part of Turkey, and has a soft spot for all the peoples who have lived, loved, died and killed there.

... contd.