Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury — It’s not often we come across Turkish crime fiction, much less examples influenced by Nabokov and Highsmith, but Yiğit Karaahmet has produced an original, atmospheric debut with LGBTQ+ themes. Summerhouse is set on Büyükada, an island just off Istanbul, and follows a single summer and one event that irreversibly alters the life of a couple.
We meet Fehmi and Şener on their 40th anniversary, two months before the idyllic life they’ve created for themselves comes to an abrupt end. After years on the island, they’ve been accepted by the locals, despite their relationship being an unspoken secret. To everyone, they’re just two retired friends but unlike heterosexual couples they are unable to express their love in public.
When the house next door gets new tenants for the summer, they know they’ll have to be extra careful. However, Cem, Berna and their teenage son also have a secret. Beneath the front of a happy family danger lurks. They’re spending summer on the island to avoid an incident back home. After their attractive and volatile son, Deniz, started a fight at school, his parents felt it would be best to move away for a few months until the situation settles down. Naturally, Deniz can do no wrong in the eyes of his mother, Berna. Despite her insistence that he wasn’t “that kind of kid,” he was just that, and the summer on the island would prove her wrong.
Fehmi is translating a play and supervising the construction of a new gazebo where the couple can host friends for sundowners with a view of Istanbul’s lights in the distance. Neither endeavour appears to hold his attention. Until he sees “the saddest, most beautiful boy in the world” next door. Deniz epitomises everything Fehmi is no longer: youthful, beautiful and sexually charged. The young man is well aware of his power. Fehmi sneakily watches Deniz in his bedroom throughout the following few weeks, never misses an opportunity to chat with him, and is constantly reading the paper on the veranda when Deniz is outside kicking his football.
Şener, unlike Fehmi, has never wavered in his attention and loyalty to Fehmi. But as he begins to notice his partner’s strange behaviour, he is deeply shaken by the realisation that their relationship is more fragile than he had believed. Fehmi exhibits the telltale signs of an affair, including a sudden zest for life, exercise and a fixation with youth and beauty.
Though he feels betrayed, Şener doesn’t not confront Fehmi. Instead, he visits one of Istanbul’s legendary bathhouses in search of a lover, but the experience leaves him feeling old and alone. Even there, the young men taunt him for his decrepitude. When he returns to Büyükada he decides to take control again.
Karaahmet addresses the issues surrounding same-sex partnerships, specifically societal judgement and prejudice. But he also clearly expresses our fear of growing old and no longer being desirable. He regularly uses visual language to create an atmosphere. For example, the ferry Şener sails on is referred to as a hearse “…bearing the casket of their relationship to its final resting place. A white hearse, accompanied by a funeral procession not of vultures, but of seagulls.”
Summerhouse is essentially the story of a relationship and the challenges of ageing, tightly wrapped up in a psychological thriller jacket. Although it’s not your average murder mystery or procedural, it has a suspenseful, brooding feel that is evocative of Hitchcock, while the isolation of the island reminds one of an Agatha Christie novel. If you enjoy a slow-burn with a gnawing sense of unease that doesn’t let up, not even in its ending, this is for you.
For more Hitchcockian crime try The Woman in the Window or go straight to the original with Vertigo.
Soho Crime
Print/Kindle/iBook
£10.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
