Orhan Pamuk has written better than most contemporary novelists about the relationship between east and west. His great book Istanbul: Memories of a City mingles history, personal reminiscence and political analysis to produce a panorama of the city that is also a map of the world – at once clearly drawn and poetically evocative. Much the same goes for his novels. While they explore separations, they look for elements that unite.

The Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, is driven by the same obsessions, but develops them in suggestive new directions. While establishing a link “between the nature of a civilisation and its approach to notions of parricide and filicide”, it blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables.

There are three sections, the first two apparently narrated by Cem Celik, the teenage son of a leftist who in the mid 1980s is snatched from his family by the state police, and later abandons his home for more selfish reasons. This leaves Cem searching for a father substitute, which he finds in the figure of Master Mahmut, a well-digger who employs him as an apprentice.

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Travelling with Mahmut to the countryside near Istanbul, Cem learns how a father figure can inspire fear as well as affection, and how secrets need to be preserved in order to create an independent sense of self. More routinely, but more enjoyably, he finds a way to lose his heart, when he glimpses a mysterious red-haired woman on one of his evening jaunts to the local village of Ongoren. She turns out to be attached to a travelling theatre of morality tales, and in all respects the ideal focus for his fantasies.

At every turn, Pamuk balances the actual against the symbolic. The well is a site of genuinely hard work, but also a dive into the subconscious. Themes are as important as naturalism. Cem is obsessed by the story of Oedipus, which of course centres on a son’s murder of his father, and the woman in her theatre performs a version of the Sohrab and Rostam saga, in which a father murders his son. Both Cem and the woman are set on a course that continuously weighs and compares the role of fate, the example of history, the warnings of myth, and the flow of everyday life.

The first section closes with the woman and Cem sleeping together; “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she tells him ominously. Near the beginning of the second section, in which Cem returns to Istanbul, he finds a new love, Ayse, and hears his father (with whom he is now back in touch) say that she “is just like your mother”. Clearly the shadow of the past still falls darkly across the present – but rather than seeking to evade their lessons, Cem and Ayse welcome them. They set up a company called Sohrab; they continue to brood about the Oedipus story; they travel the world looking at manuscripts of the Iranian national epic the Shah-nameh, in which Abolqasem Ferdowsi tells the story of Sohrab’s killing by his father Rostam.

And the effect? As Cem and Ayse begin to see the larger political issues raised by these stories, so we start to read The Red-Haired Woman as a parable about present-day Turkey: about the injuries and aspirations that lead to the election of an authoritarian leader, and about the manifold grave dangers of such a process.

“It seems we would all like a strong, decisive father telling us what to do and what not to do,” Cem says. “Is it because it is so difficult to distinguish what we should and shouldn’t do, what is moral and right from what is sinful and wrong? Or is it because we constantly need to be reassured that we are innocent and have not sinned? Is the need for a father always there, or do we feel it only when we are confused, or anguished, when our world is falling apart?”

Given the force that Pamuk ascribes to myth, it’s hardly surprising to find Cem drawn back to Ongoren at the end of his narrative. The remainder of the novel revolves around a tussle between the power of inherited stories and the resilience of individual will, and Pamuk’s way of telling it involves a major but well-prepared surprise.

In a novel less thoroughly aware of its own strategies, this authorial friskiness would seem clunky. Here it seems happily all-of-a-piece. It reminds us that The Red-Haired Woman, like all good novels determined to deliver political and social criticism, understands that pleasure in the means of the delivery must equal the value of the thing said.

• Andrew Motion’s Silver: Return to Treasure Island is published by Vintage.

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