'The Red-Haired Woman' by Orhan Pamuk

'The Red-Haired Woman' by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Ekin Oklap (Faber & Faber, 272 pages, £17)

In his more recent novels Orhan Pamuk has adopted a simplicity distinct from labyrinthine earlier works. The Nobel prize-winning author's "A Strangeness in My Mind," published in English in 2015, was an almost Dickensian tome chronicling the life of a poor Istanbul street-seller amid wrenching changes in the city over decades.

At first glance, "The Red-Haired Woman" continues this realist trajectory, examining the relationship between a traditional well-digger and his young apprentice. But the book develops into a complex symbolic parable, with an apparently simple story taking a darker twist. A slim work compared to the doorstoppers of "A Strangeness in My Mind" and the earlier "The Museum of Innocence," Pamuk's 10th novel is a modest 250 pages.

Its first part focuses on Master Mahmut, a 43-year-old laborer who has dedicated his life to digging more than 150 wells over the years. He is "among the last practitioners of an art that had existed for thousands of years," still using "the ancient traditional methods of well-digging with spade and pickax, of slow excavation by the bucketful on a wooden windlass, of lining the walls meter by meter with concrete."

A textile merchant employs Mahmut to find water in a two-acre plot in the fictional district Öngören outside Istanbul, earmarked for a new factory. The land is primitive and has no electricity supply, but he is promised handsome rewards if he manages to find water. He takes as an apprentice Cem, a teenager from a middle-class Istanbul family, and they start their back-breaking work in the heat of summer. 

An unlikely paternal bond forms between the taskmaster...