My Name Is Red is a novel in 20 different voices. Half are fabulous: the personified elements of the exquisite illuminations painted by several of the leading characters. These are decorative and digressive. The other voices belong to 10 characters who tell us, in alternating chapters, their parts of what is a murder story. Or rather, nine characters: the narrator who calls himself "the Murderer" is identical with one of the other named narrators. We have to find which one.
The multiplication of narrators serves the historical murder story well. Uncertainty about events is enacted in the very form. There is no all-knowing narrator to see the truth. A leading Victorian experimenter with multiple narrators was mystery writer Wilkie Collins. His novel The Moonstone is comprised of the testimonies of 10 characters, used in an appropriately forensic manner. The solution to the crime, the theft of a priceless diamond, is to be pieced together from the different narratives.
Multiple narrators also serve the historical aspect of Pamuk's fiction. A sense of the past is to be pieced together from separate testimonies rather than grasped by some "modern" narrator. Another recent example of the historical mystery, Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost, comparably uses several narrators, though many fewer than Pamuk.
Multiple narrators came to the English novel quite early in its development, via the novel in letters. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-8) and Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771) are leading 18th-century examples. Both are "told" by a number of fictional correspondents. One ambition of the novel has always been to show how the truth about human behaviour can depend on one's vantage point. Clarissa shows tragically, and Humphrey Clinker comically, how the same events may be viewed differently by different characters.
For the contemporary novelist, the prospects allowed by multiple narrators can be beguiling. In his bestselling Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières mixed chapters narrated in an authorial voice with others narrated by personages invented and historical. The technique seemed matched to the political and linguistic variety of the characters. Yet it can also disperse the reader's sympathies. In De Bernières's latest book, Birds Without Wings, there sometimes seem so many voices, with their different stories, that the novel can hardly cohere.
Pamuk avoids this (Wilkie Collins-like) by making his non-fabulous narrators serve one pressing plot. They narrate as if aware of each other, knowing where to take up the story or leave it. At the end of one chapter, the Murderer tells how he confessed his guilt to Enishte, the master of painters. The next chapter, narrated by Enishte, begins a moment later, as if seizing the narrative baton. "A silence filled the room when he confessed he'd murdered Elegant Effendi." This effect is frequent throughout: Character A ends a chapter arriving at Character B's house; Character B begins his chapter by opening the door.
Yet Pamuk also wants disparities between viewpoints. In the book's love story, the very disconnection of narratives is used to focus our sympathies. The lovers, Black and Shekure, cannot hear each other's passions and doubts. Their meetings are snatched, sometimes silent. They are brought together by the murder story that each narrates only partially, but the novel's very form has them warily manoeuvre around each other, eventual consummation elaborately delayed.
Pamuk's model for his discrete narratives is oral. His narrators are speaking, like the storyteller in the Istanbul coffee-house to whom he keeps returning. Reading in translation probably blurs the effect, for any original distinctions between the voices of the different narrators have faded in the move from Turkish to English.
To hold the narratives together Pamuk needs the reader, the person to whom his characters confess. This can seem to disrupt the very convention he is using. Characters keep turning to us for confirmation. When Shekure describes finding her father's body, she pauses to establish that she is talking to someone who has read the accounts given by other characters. "Listen, I can tell by your tight-lipped and cold-blooded reaction that you've known for some time what's happened in this room."
"Have I gained your trust as well?" one of the suspects typically asks the reader.
"Until you asked me," might be the answer.
· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. If you would like to respond to any of his columns email email@example.com