It is not enough for the aspiring writer of Ottoman Empire fiction to deliver painful and cruel fates upon his unsuspecting characters.
It isn't enough to describe the decline of Ertugrul Osman, who had the line to immortality ripped out of his juvenile fingers and never wrote off the deficit over the rest of his long life.
As the light of dawn warmed the nascent Turkish republic, it's possible to critique the early leaders for leaving their last Ottoman to take his chances with madness and depression. To have offered him their protection would have been to fail to make a complete break with the past, and the formative years of any nation are spent making a distinction between what there is and what there was. If this is as far as we go, though, we are selling ourselves short.
There are the unsubstantiated stories from sources whose veracity ranges from impeccable to deliberately vague gossip, about the split in Ataturk's government caused by throwing Ertugrul to the wolves, for not all thought that the jettisoning of their history with the bathwater was the way to behave for what aspired to be a mature democracy. It's uncertain exactly how many of these - similar - tales doing the rounds in 1920s Turkey are more than Chinese whispers, though, originated by embittered ex-Ottomans or invented by government members whose lofty ambitions hadn't been realised under the new order.
Furthermore, the writer can ensure that the empire is never quite buried. If the politics has moved on such that its resurrection is impossible, even when we're writing fancifully, there can nevertheless be the bones of something - an idea, or a wish, or the sense of history laying dormant and ready, at some unspecified point in the future, to unfold in exactly the same confusing, mindless state in a different place, to the bewilderment of those upon whom it is inflicted.
If this is the outer limit of the author's talent, alas, then we shall struggle on alone in the painfully bright light of the monitor until God knows what time, busy doing nothing more than running on the spot.
For if you want to write - really write - then you must permit the insanity of what you're thinking to infect you like a disease. It is insufficient to describe situations in a precise yet detached way. No, the only thing to do is to swim with the current, and be at its mercy.
If you want to write about the delusions of a would-be sultan, then firstly you have to become the nearest thing possible to a screaming wreck before pulling back from the edge - complete with enough information about how the madman's mind works to convincingly describe the push and pull of various thoughts, escalating from an insignificant whim to a dangerous compulsion, that characterises Ertugrul's demise. This same gradual drift into madness, expressed in reverse, is analogous to the labour pains of the new Turkey.
