The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak
Review by Razaq
The Architect’s Apprentice is a sweeping journey through a tumultuous century of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its powers in the 16/17th centuries. The hundred or so years in the book cover the era of Suleiman the Magnificent, and his successors Selim II, and Murad III.
The novel by Elif Shafak, a Turkish-English author is historical fiction that stays true to the spirit of the era. She does take some artistic liberties with the sequence of events and insertion of fictional characters to shape the narrative. The titular character and his exploits are her fictional additions.
I had access to the e-book version of the book and the audio version of the book, and I was able to go seamlessly between the two formats. Listening to the book made me feel like I was hearing a magical tale from Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights.
Elif was apparently inspired to write this book after she saw a painting of Suleiman the Magnificent with a ceremonially bedecked elephant (with its mahout) in the background. Which made her wonder about that elephant — where did it come from and how did it become part of the royal court.
Through a series of interesting (whether they are fortunate or unfortunate is debatable) events, Jahan, a young Indian boy arrives at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent as the mahout of a white elephant calf, Chota, sent by the Mughal Emperor Humayun to Suleiman as a royal gift.
Curiosity killed the cat they say, but the endlessly curious Jahan manages to survive and even thrive at the periphery of the royal court, where the menagerie exists. He strikes up a curious, but necessarily distant fellowship with Princess Mihrimah, the only daughter of Suleiman. You get a sense that they are kindred souls, despite their stations in life — the lonely mahout far removed from his family and his country of birth, and the lonely princess who considers her nursemaid her surrogate parent. The Princess is enthralled by the white elephant and visits the Royal menagerie often… to spend time with the elephant and to hear Jahan’s fantastical tales. Could the friendship blossom into more than just friendship, under such circumstances?
Struggling to stay relevant (after all the sultan might get bored with the elephant and banish it from the palace!), young Jahan convinces the royal court that Chota has a war elephant lineage and that he can be a useful addition to the Ottoman army in their campaigns. And endless campaigns there were… Suleiman the Magnificent is reported to have spent more time on horseback directing the various campaigns than sitting on his throne in Istanbul. Chota, of course, is totally unwarlike, but the lion tamer lends Jahan a hand, and they train Chota to become a war elephant. Things do not go according to plan in the battle, and Jahan is consumed with regret for having gotten Chota tangled in military matters.
On one of those military campaigns, Jahan meets Mimar Sinan, who is a Janissary in the service of Suleiman. Sinan, who distinguishes himself by building bridges (he is a builder and a carpenter by training), and other military structures while on the campaign eventually becomes the Chief Royal Architect for Suleiman. And in due course, Jahan becomes an apprentice to Sinan, while continuing his duties as the mahout of the royal elephant Chota. Sinan has three other apprentices — he is a wise and equanimous man who picks his apprentices with care (each has a backstory that slowly comes to the fore). The apprentices love their master, they work hard, and they work well with each other, but there is an undercurrent of tension, and is there a danger of that low tension ballooning into something like jealousy? How does one get to be first among equals? And what role does the palace play, with its myriad connections and intrigues?
The book is divided into three parts — the part before Jahan meets Mimar Sinan (mostly about Jahan and the elephant and how they get established in the palace), the part while he is Sinan’s apprentice (this is the prime of Jahan life and the time of his various adventures), and the part after Sinan (the period when all loose ends are tidied up).
Elif does a great job of describing the city of Istanbul — the great buildings, tree-lined avenues, the Royal palaces, gardens and harems, and the mean streets and desperate hovels. You get a sense of the bustling metropolis that was the power center of a powerful and extensive Ottoman Empire. In times of war or sickness, you also get a sense of the dread and malaise that befell the city as one plague or another calamity swept through.
The book has many characters as befits a sweeping 100-year saga, but the number of characters is not so large that it becomes difficult to follow the story or the different character threads.
The narrative markers in the book are the monumental works that Sinan and his apprentices create — the Suleimaniye Mosque in Istanbul, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (Adrianople), the renovation of the Hagia Sophia, the renovation of the ancient/Roman aqueducts that bring water to the city of Istanbul, and the royal observatory. Each project has unique attributes and turns out to be fertile ground for vehement disagreements and palace intrigue, and each project feels like it could be the end of the road for Sinan and Jahan, but they endure… seemingly always living on the edge. Sultans are impatient people… if they don’t get their way, they don’t think twice before using extreme measures!
Jahan is a sympathetic character who mostly tries to do the right thing, with his actions driven by love and loyalty, though often it feels like he is being swept along by events that he has little control over. Jahan gets into his share of scrapes but manages to wriggle out of them with help from some likely and some unlikely places — Chota, the elephant he loves, his master Sinan, his fellow animal keepers in the menagerie, and even the chief of the gypsies of Istanbul! But the opponents are no pushovers — the Grand Vizier, the Shaykh Al-Islam (the chief religious authority), the chief white Eunuch, the disapproving nursemaid to Mihrimah, and many more — all somewhat cartoonish, but all suitably villainous!
The denouement makes clear all the underlying tangles of relationships, bonds of love and respect on one side and jealousies on the other, happiness and joy on one side and long suffering and smoldering rage on the other, trust on side and deception on the other. And things are not always what they seem to be.
In the intro to the book, Jahan muses: “only a few have discovered the Centre of the Universe — where there is no good and no evil, no past and no future, no ‘I’ and no ‘thou’, no war, and no reason for war, just an endless sea of calm. What they found there was so beautiful that they lost their ability to speak…”
As the sweeping saga winds down, at a particularly poignant moment of his life that has to do with his beloved elephant Chota, Jahan thinks that he has finally found the center of the universe that he has always been seeking: “In that moment a strange calmness came over him. He was, for the first time, at peace with himself. He was part of everything, and everything was part of him. So, this was it, he thought. Centre of the universe was neither in the East nor in the West. It was where one surrendered to love.”
The magical, fairy-tale like quality of the book draws you in and holds you and you wonder at the end of it all what it would be like to find your own center of the universe!
