Turkey Unveiled: Ataturk and After by Nicole and Hugh Pope John Murray, 373pp, £25 in UK; The Turkish Labyrinth: Ataturk and the New Islam by James Pettifer Viking, 245pp, £18 in UKIn Mozart's opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, which received its premiere in Vienna in 1782, a fearless young Spanish prince sets out to rescue his princess-to-be from the harem of the notorious Pasha Selim, who has carried her off in traditional Turkish fashion. His plans having misfired, he is taken prisoner, prepares himself for what he naturally expects to be a grim death at the hands of the barbaric Turk - and is astonished when, instead of chopping off hands and heads all round, Selim dispenses forgiveness and generosity and sends everybody home happy.
So have attitudes changed much since 1782? Not really. The Ottoman armies may no longer be around to give the gates of Vienna a good old rattle, but the relationship between Turkey and the rest of Europe remains, at best, ambiguous. There is still a vast gulf of mutual mistrust based on mutual stereotypes which range from the outdated to the outrageous. Western tourists fall tentatively in love with Turkey only to be greeted, back home, by a relentless barrage of criticism of the Turkish record on human rights; the European establishment clucks reassuringly about Turkey's strategic importance as a bridge between east and west at strategic intervals, but when Turkey applies to enter the EU it reacts, as Nicole and Hugh Pope put it in Turkey Unveiled, "as if one of the ugly sisters had asked the prince for a dance".
But with the emergence of a plethora of new nation-states in Eastern Europe and central Asia, not to mention the development of a strongly Islamic identity among Asian ethnic minorities in Western Europe, the comfortable old notions of "east" and "west" are likely to take a hammering in the not-too-distant future - which makes these two studies of contemporary Turkey both fascinating and timely.
As the titles of both books suggest, both sets of authors set out on an ambitious process of demystification, Pettifer to explore the "Turkish labyrinth", the Popes to "unveil".
Both are firmly rooted in a Western world-view and both, significantly, take the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's republican revolution as a starting-point; both, courageously, grasp the prickly topics which are guaranteed to draw blood - Cyprus, the Kurdish question, human rights, the role of Islam. While claiming to be sympathetic to Turkey, both books are highly critical of certain aspects of Turkish socio-political culture - and each is amusing in its certainty, gloomily expressed, that these criticisms will be anathema to the Turkish powers-that-be, whatever their politics.
In tone and approach, however, Turkey Unveiled and The Turkish Labyrinth are very different. The Popes put their emphasis squarely on politics, squashing everything which happened before Ataturk into a couple of chapters and tracing everything which has happened since in clear, bold lines which effortlessly bring today's political parties - Motherland, True Path, Refah - into sharp focus. Personalities are supplied to go with the names which are familiar to Western readers - Ciller, Erbakan, Yilmaz - and if it comes as a shock to read what they write about Ataturk's "sexual appetites and fast living", it's just as much of a surprise to discover that the leader of the 1980 junta, General Evren, had a gentle side: "it is not generally realised that throughout the first years of the military intervention, was sleeping in the corridor of his military villa in order not to disturb his diabetic wife Sekine after she had suffered a stroke". This is a pragmatic, brisk trot across the territory, written out of an awesome depth of first-hand knowledge of the country, tough, at times uncompromising, yet informed by a deep understanding of what makes Turkey tick: "Compassion, humour and a sense of the tragic are not qualities generally attributed to Turkey in the West . . . [but] Turkey's many contradictions make it the homeland of the absurd." James Pettifer tends towards a more lyrical style, his opening chapters ranging from a somewhat alarming (and not, it must be said, entirely accurate) depiction of the Inonu stadium in Istanbul - "muscular, male, wild, tribal and frightening, on the field and off it" - to an atmospheric visit to the Black Sea coast - "huge waves swept up by the northern gales in the winter soak cars with salt spray along the quayside, thick fogs blind the coast in autumn, making this northern fringe of Turkey seem more like Dickensian London or Manchester".
This is not, for sure, the glorious Mediterranean coast of the brochures, but it's always interesting, and shines a light into some perplexing little corners of Turkish life. First-time visitors to Turkey need, for example, never again wonder why the average Turk drinks nothing but black tea, and not the viscous coffee foreigners have been led to expect: coffee being both the great drink of the Ottoman world and an expensive import, Ataturk decided to subsidise the creation of an indigenous tea industry as an exercise both in import substitution and in political correctness, with impressive results.
Wisely, neither James Pettifer nor Nicole and Hugh Pope come to any hard and fast conclusions about their complex subject, nor do they offer advice, however well-meaning, to whichever government will lead Turkey into the new millennium. But the wealth of information these two books contain make them essential reading in the meantime.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist