Almost half a century after the death of Irfan Orga, author of the highly acclaimed cult memoir Portrait of a Turkish Family, his son, Ates Orga, opened an old attaché case and found a coffee-stained typescript tied up with string. Dark Journey springs from a sombre understanding of the ambivalence of human nature, a metaphor, perhaps, for the exiled Orga’s Turkish republican homeland.
Dark Journey is a disturbing, fast-paced story of a young Turkish woman’s descent towards moral annihilation – one part Maupassant, one part One Thousand and One Nights. In the early Turkish republic, the options of an impoverished widow with a child are few, and the choices made by Kamelya lead to her estrangement from her son Murat. But blood ties, secrecy and fate bring them back together for a denouement that smoulders like a Greek myth, with pent-up love and its explosive corollary, deep-seated hate.
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