The Woman in White, The Left-Handed Woman, The Woman on the Stairs, The Woman on the Beach… After what must be thousands of mysterious titular women espied by befuddled male protagonists in song, literature and film, few themes are more ripe for retirement. But even those still anxious for an account of an improbable, decades–long yearning for a person who could barely be called an acquaintance are likely to be disappointed by Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman.

The novel opens with a building contractor and once-aspiring author addressing readers in a mock-ominous tone, warning them against concluding that his setting down of the facts should mean that the story is behind him. ‘The more I remember,’ he says, ‘the deeper I fall into it. Perhaps you, too, will follow, lured by the enigma of fathers and sons.’

The narrator presents himself as a young man from a middle-class family in Istanbul. His father is a pharmacist and sometime Lothario whose left-wing politics occasionally land him behind bars. Eventually he disappears for the last time, the pharmacy closes and the narrator, needing money for a crammer to excel in his university entrance exams, takes a summer job guarding an orchard owned by his aunt’s husband. While there he meets a well-digger, Master Mahmut, who offers him a more lucrative post digging a well for a new dye works on the outskirts of Ongören. After some argument, his mother lets him go.

Early in their excavations, Mahmut and the narrator go to the town for supplies. The latter catches sight of a red-haired woman who will haunt his thoughts for the remainder of the book. Pamuk summons her charms with a variety of dead descriptors: she is ‘lovely’, she has ‘perfectly curved lips’, she is ‘very alluring’, her smile is ‘unexpectedly sweet and tender’.

The next eighty pages recount the digging of the well. Despite the dusty soil, Mahmut remains certain of finding water. To pass the time, he and the narrator tell each other stories, among them the myth of Oedipus and a variant of the famous tale about Death known to English speakers from Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Appointment in Samarra’. Periodically the narrator walks into town to stare at the Red-Haired Woman’s building; eventually he learns she is part of a theatre troupe and he manages to witness a performance. One scene, based on the tale of Rostam and Sohrab from the Persian epic Shahnameh, shows a father murdering his son. Shaken, the narrator leaves, and the Red-Haired Woman accosts him outside the theatre tent. They drink and make love (‘It was momentous, and it was miraculous’), and the narrator returns to the camp late, drunk. The next day, he drops a bucket on Mahmut in the well. The man fails to respond to his calls. The narrator fears the worst and runs off to catch the train home, lest he be accused of killing his master.

For the next few decades, as he attends university, marries and goes into business, the narrator is plagued by twin obsessions: the Red-Haired Woman and the possibility that he killed his master. We know this largely thanks to such pronouncements as ‘I still thought about Master Mahmut and my crime’ or ‘I thus entered a phase of fantasies about seeking out the Red-Haired Woman’. He becomes fixated on the Oedipus legend and the Shahnameh, seeing them as aids to understanding his guilt, and begins travelling the world to look at Greek relics and Persian illuminated manuscripts. In a passage reminiscent of a primary school book report, the narrator explains the meaning of these fables:

Stepping back and examining the matter rationally, I could see what was so familiar about Sohrab and Rostam’s tale and its resemblance to the story of Oedipus. There were in fact surprising parallels between Oedipus’s life and Sohrab’s. But there was one fundamental difference, too: Oedipus murdered his father, while Sohrab was murdered by his father. One is a story of patricide, the other a story of filicide.

By now, few can fail to foresee that a reunion with the Red-Haired Woman is in the wings, and with it a mortal father–son conflict. The one surprise, a bit of metanarrative conceit reminiscent of the finale of Pamuk’s The Black Book, is neither amusing nor beguiling, but it does push the barely believable plot firmly into the realm of the ludicrous.

The difficulty with this novel is the impression it gives of being assembled from ready-made parts, like an Ikea wardrobe. The description of rare manuscripts from the Topkapı Palace Manuscript Library reads like catalogue copy; the account of Istanbul’s construction boom and the absorption of surrounding towns and villages into the city might have come from Pamuk’s last book, A Strangeness in My Mind. The prose itself is a patchwork of clichés, from ‘fearful prospect’ to ‘dazzling views’ to ‘expressing sincere admiration’. In the one vivid description, the Red-Haired Woman recalls washing her son; his ‘sweet, melon-shaped head, his little bean of a penis, and his strawberry pink nipples’ suggest a reverie after a trip through the produce aisle. This is not merely a matter of language – which might, however improbably, be imputed to the translation – but of the sentiments expressed. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is an overused dictum, but an appropriate rebuke to this bland novel, the events of which, despite their melodrama, have no more force than stage directions in a script.