'Endgame' by Ahmet Altan

'Endgame' by Ahmet Altan (Canongate, £13, 384 pages)

Ahmet Altan is best known in Turkey for his period as editor-in-chief of daily Taraf from 2007 to 2012. During Altan's controversial tenure, the newspaper published a blockbuster series of documents purporting to show how Turkey's shady "deep state" was plotting to foment chaos to justify overthrowing the government. It soon became clear that much of the evidence was fabricated and Taraf's editors failed to conduct rudimentary checks on the documents - either innocence bordering on the criminal or actual criminal distortion. The revelations through which Taraf made its name obscured a crude power grab under the guise of democratization. Today they stand as a blot on Turkey's legal and political history, prompting a hysterical witch-hunt and perpetuating a political culture of impunity and cynical calculation. 

Some who worked with Altan at Taraf are now in exile, others were arrested, others turned 180 degrees and protected their positions in the pro-government press. As the poet Murathan Mungan has said, "In Turkey you can be anything, but you can't be disgraced." Altan himself returned happily to writing novels, which he was doing long before his time at the helm of Taraf. When "Endgame" appeared in Turkish in 2013, it was his first novel in almost 10 years. Perhaps his skills got rusty over his time off; it is not a very impressive return.
 
The novel is narrated by an unnamed author who has retired to a small town near the coast to work on a book. Hoping for a quiet life, he instead finds a world of suspicion, paranoia and violence, where "fear was like an infectious virus, spreading with every exchange." He seduces women and half-inadvertently gets embroiled in bitter power struggles...