I struggled at first with Dance to the Music of Time. It is otiose to allude to Powell’s circumlocutory style making Henry James’s prolix, copia verborum seem exiguous. However, I persisted and now I am hooked.
Getting into Dancers is not made any easier by the large cast of characters, their shifting matrimonial alliances and complicated family structures. I am now At Lady Molly’s (volume four) in which a sinister and decrepit butler is sent to fetch a bottle of sherry “as one who, having received the order of the bowstring, makes for the Bosphorus”.
Powell alludes to a practice in the Ottoman Empire when a senior official would be summoned to take sherbert with the chief executioner, the bostancı basha or head gardener. If his sherbert was white all was well, if red it was a sentence of death. The condemned man was given a chance to evade his fate. If he could run through the palace to the Bosphorus before his executioner his sentence was commuted to exile. If the executioner was waiting for him at the Fish Gate he was strangled with a bowstring as the Ottomans had an aversion to spilling blood.
I had heard this before from a client whom I know as Omer Namouk but is more properly called Ömer Abdülmecid Osmanoğlu. He is thoroughly anglicised, having been to the Dragon and Stowe. Over agreeable lunches at The George and Vulture he reminisced about his family. He is descended from Sultan Mehmed V, the penultimate Ottoman ruler, who played a decisive role in bringing that empire to a close.
He ruled from 1909 until 1918, bringing his country into the First World War on the side of the Kaiser. In 1922 the Osman dynasty that had ruled for some 600 years was snuffed out when Turkey became a republic. Omer’s mother went into exile in India as a guest of a Maharajah and told him that her host was wont to have his collection of pearls cleaned and laid out on a flat roof to dry – it looked for all the world as if there had been a heavy fall of snow. He also told me that because it was considered unseemly to spill blood the only accepted method of disposing of an unpopular Sultan was by suffocation with a pillow. In fact it was also allowable to strangle with a silk handkerchief and (once only) to compress the unfortunate victim’s testicles. Succession disputes which were common in the early years were almost entirely eliminated by a sanctioned policy of fratricide – not something of which I approve.
When I last heard from Omer he had moved from the south coast to Abingdon where I hope he is still happily settled, winning chess competitions and doting on his grandchildren.