Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands: Yet another passive friggin' protagonist (#13)

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, goes the old adage -- and when in Rome, read their books. While I am still deep in the throes of Game of Thrones -- I've just started Dance with Dragons -- I've also realized that while I am spending time in Turkey, I should explore some of their literature and expand my horizons a little bit further.

And so I began with Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands, a novel by expatriate Lawrence Goodman that was published in Turkey, which accounts for its scarcity of Amazon.com. (Okay, so it's not exactly "Turkish" literature, but it is set in Turkey, on an island in the Sea of Marmara, just off Istanbul.) I didn't expect much from it, though I hoped it would be a sweet read in the vein of My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle by Marcel Pagnol or Rosamunde Pilcher's Sleeping Tiger. But it wasn't to be, mostly because Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands features one of fiction's most passive protagonists -- something that any casual reader of this blog knows I hate. And most interestingly, for once that boring protagonist is a man!

The novel revolves around Ed Wilkie, a Californian in his early 30s who has impulsively decided to take a job teaching English at a boys' school on one of the Princes' Islands. It begins with his arrival in Istanbul -- he's a single man, accompanied only by his dog, Starleen -- and though things seem to be a bit odd, merely a sign of things to come, Ed takes it all in stride. It turns out that Ed never questions a thing -- despite all the bizarre incidents that happen over the course of Sweet Confusion, the man never shows the slightest bit of curiousity about anything. He doesn't even know the first name, nationality or specific line of business of his closest friend on the island. The book blurb calls him naive, but he struck me as sort of a dimwit.

Superficially, Sweet Confusion is a tale about the minor but zany adventures surrounding a naive young man thrust into a new world. But the adventures aren't always minor -- there is murder and drug trafficking, after all -- and they aren't particularly zany. And that's because the story is from Ed's point of view, and again, Ed never has a reaction to anything or asks any questions. As a result, nothing in the plot is well-developed; weird things happen, but it's generally without significant or emotional comment from any of the characters, making for a very flat book. Not surprisingly, the end was completely contrived and ridiculous.