In late 16th-century Istanbul, the Sultan commissions a great book. Designed to celebrate his life and his empire, it will be illuminated - naturally - by the best artists the Ottoman court can provide. But the Sultan wants his book to be illustrated not in the traditional style of the old Persian masters, but in the European manner, using the outlandish new Western techniques of perspective and portraiture. It is - at a time when the city is in thrall to a fundamentalist movement which rejects representational art as an insult to Islam - a dangerous idea.
Four painters and a gilder are contracted to work in secret, on a need-to-know basis; even so, the gilder is brutally murdered. The Sultan demands that the crime be solved within three days. Could there be a clue in the half-finished paintings?
So much for the plot of My Name Is Red; and at one level the book does work, as a crime novel does, in an atmosphere of suspense, suspicion and shifting blame. At another level, however, it is a leisurely affair, wandering into the closed world of the Ottoman miniaturists and poking around like a child let loose in a sweet-shop store-room. Narrator succeeds narrator in an elegant, circular motion reminiscent of an elegant, stylised court dance: but there is never a moment's confusion for the reader, for each chapter is labelled - "I Am Called Black", "It Is I, Master Osman", and so on, with only the murderer's identity kept under wraps.
To attempt to sustain a high level of tension while allowing plenty of time and space for lengthy re-tellings of traditional legends, minute descriptions of famous manuscript paintings and detailed debates about love, friendship and the demands of artistic integrity is ambitious in the extreme, but then Pamuk has never shied from difficulty, whether technical or thematic. His first book, The White Castle, about a young Italian scholar captured by pirates, was a delicate meditation on East and West; his second, The Black Book, a dazzling urban detective story; his third, The New Life, an intricate study of the Anatolian steppes.
His themes are large - the complexity of individual identity, the relationship between form and content - but the skill is in the details. So, too, is the Turkishness. Crystal-clear pictures of Pamuk's native land emerge, almost by accident, from his pages, affectionate yet rueful; the glorious chaos of contemporary Istanbul from The Black Book, the dream-like vividness of small Turkish towns from The New Life, and now, the intrigues of Ottoman court painters and the radical, yet apparently minuscule, changes which have defined the Islamic attitude to art.
Though the subject matter of My Name Is Red is arcane, the book itself is Pamuk's most approachable - it is also, with its deft touches of humour and its effortlessly-managed resolution, his most satisfying.
One small but vital quibble: is it really necessary to render Turkish place-names in ugly "Kathleen, Mavourneen"-style phonetics? Surely 21st-century readers can cope with ╟arsikapi, rather than the horrid Charshikapi? And can it be put right, Mr Publisher, please?
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
