The Gendarme

July 19, 2010
Mustian's debut novel is a meditation on memory in which the dreams of a former Turkish soldier contain the truth of his past. Emmett Conn is 92 and living in Georgia when he begins dreaming of his youth and his involvement in the Armenian diaspora. After 70 years of amnesia caused by his WWI injuries, Emmett's past returns with a vengeance following surgery for a brain tumor. Emmett knows he fought the British at Gallipoli, was wounded, and was cared for by a nurse, Carol, whom he married and accompanied back to the U.S. But in his violent dreams, he relives his actions as a Turkish gendarme in the forced death march of thousands of Armenians into Syria. Emmett recalls snippets of his murderous and rapacious acts but also of his obsession with a beautiful young Armenian girl, Araxie. His dream life leads him to one conclusion: he must find Araxie and beg her forgiveness. Mustian's staccato prose, an attempt to emulate Emmett's skittish and elusive dreams, works sometimes better than others, but the novel effectively captures the human capacity for survival and redemption.

July 15, 2010

Memories of the Armenian genocide haunt an ancient Turkish-American in this novel from Florida attorney Mustian. 

When Ahmet Khan tried to join the Ottoman army in 1915 to fight the British and Russians, he was ruled too young, so the Turk joined the paramilitary gendarmerie instead. His first assignment was a baptism of fire. Later that year, in the army now, Ahmet suffered a brain injury and amnesia. A POW, he emerged from a long coma in a London hospital where Carol, an American nurse, protected and eventually married him. They moved to New York and had two daughters. Now, at the ripe old age of 92, Ahmet (his name Americanized to Emmett Conn) is living alone in Georgia, his wife's home state. Carol is dead. Ahmet has a seizure. Tests reveal a brain tumor. Suddenly, memories of that first assignment flood back in a series of dreams. Ahmet's job was to escort 2,000 Armenian deportees across Turkey. It was a death march, one component of the genocide. By the time they reached Aleppo, Syria, only 65 had survived. Disease had claimed many. Ahmet and his fellow gendarmes were brutal. Rape was their prerogative. Ahmet had taken a woman on the Euphrates riverbank, letting her baby perish. All set to rape another, something stopped him. Araxie was barely into her teens. Ahmet was transfixed by her strange beauty (she had mismatched eyes). A mutual attraction, perhaps? This wisp of a romance offsets the horror of the desert trek, a horror that becomes numbing. It's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, tinged by melodrama. Mustian counterpoints this narrative with the small change of old man Ahmet's life in Georgia, his daughter Violet overseeing his hospital visits. It's an awkward mix. Ahmet comes to believe that his 17-year-old self was a monster, and he needs absolution, which leads to a wildly improbable conclusion. 

An honorable failure. The cruelty of a callow youth is an inadequate distillation of man's inhumanity to man.

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Starred review from June 1, 2010
Though we try to deny it, the past comes to get us in the end. It certainly comes for 92-year-old Emmett Conn after he is rushed to the hospital, felled by a tiny brain tumor. Emmett starts having dark and unsettling dreams of refugees marched through a barren landscape and dying off in droves owing to hunger, thirst, dysentery, and the whims of the gendarmes herding them. These aren't dreams but suppressed memories; Emmett is actually Ahmet Khan, a soldier in the Ottoman army during World War I who was evacuated to Londonhe was mistaken for a British soldierand then wed by an American nurse, who brought him stateside. What Ahmet is now recalling is his participation in the Armenian genocide. Yet on that march he scraped together enough humanity to rescue the charismatic Araxie, with whom he fell in love. VERDICT First novelist Mustian writes relentlessly, telling his haunting story in brief bursts of luminous yet entirely unsentimental prose and reminding us that, when life gets bloody, we had better watch out for our own humanity. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/1/10.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

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