By Peter Pikkert
Can Books. 103 pages
ISBN 0 900828 81 1
However interested we may be in a particular country, it can be difficult to get inside its culture and customs to enable us to have understanding and empathy. Peter Pikkert, in this short novel, manages to take his reader into modern Turkey and to the Kurd community in particular.
The chapters alternate between the two main characters: Robert, the missionary, and Masoud, the Kurdish seeker. It takes a while for us to realise that Robert is a 'missionary'. He is introduced travelling as 'the foreigner' in the opening chapter. The situation and atmosphere are superbly built up by the author in descriptive passages which are reminiscent of Graham Greene. We get inside Robert's mind as the book progresses, and come to see both his passionate sense of call to make Christ known to the Muslim people where is working, and his awareness of the cost of becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ in that culture. Robert's own struggles with his shortcomings are explored convincingly and sympathetically.
