In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed himself in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing, acquired an anguished intimacy with the region’s peoples and their secret and mythic pasts. This extraordinary intervention — which can be read as old-fashioned Orientalism or, more generously, as a globalized conscience courageously at work or, most accurately, as a bit of both — has a reflexive subplot, namely de Bellaigue’s own intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually vulnerable and romantic character.

As de Bellaigue freely explains in “Rebel Land,” a love affair drew him to Turkey in 1995, whereupon “the love affair ended but Turkey captivated me.” He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for The Economist), learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a Westernized environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist, which is to say, a subscriber to the “foundation myths” promulgated by Kemal Ataturk and holding sway in Turkey ever since. Notable among these are the notions that the Turkish republic is a nation-state containing no subgroups with valid claims to ethnic or political differentiation, let alone autonomy; that the country has a European and secular essence and destiny; and, more emotionally, that the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise reflective of a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the self-interested incomprehension of the West.

In the grip of such prejudicial ideas, de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an article for The New York Review of Books containing a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. To de Bellaigue’s somewhat surprising surprise, this excited a furious response. The controversy led the writer to a searching, shameful examination of his sources and his soul: “I had been charmed by the Turks, and perhaps intimidated by their blocking silence” about the Armenians. “I had helped to keep Turkey’s past hidden.”

It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey should be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the plentiful and detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by (overwhelmingly Christian) bystanders and survivors makes the case for an Armenian genocide hard to resist. On any view of the available materials — the Ottoman archives remain largely forbidden to scholars — the Armenians suffered a comprehensive and horrifying ethnic cleansing from their ancient homeland.