Tag: Athens

Review 1393: Friends and Heroes

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Cover of Fortunes of WarAt the end of the previous book of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, Harriet Pringle flew out of a besieged Bucharest without knowing whether Guy would be able to follow. She ends up in Athens, and the first person she meets is Prince Yakimov. Although he betrayed the Pringles to the Germans through his foolishness, Harriet is happy to see a friendly face.

Guy does arrive in Athens in the hope of getting a teaching job at the Academy. He finds Duderat and Toby Lush ensconced there as teachers. Although he employed them in Bucharest despite their lack of credentials, they do not repay his kindness with assistance. Instead, they lie to the director about him to prevent him getting a position. The director will not allow the Pringles to live at the Academy, so they find themselves with only a room to stay in and no money.

Even after they manage to establish themselves, Harriet feels alone. She understands that Guy considers her part of himself, but he therefore expends himself in work and helping others and hardly thinks of her. Out of loneliness, she finds herself attracted to a young soldier.

I didn’t like the turn the plot took with the soldier, whom I thought tiresome, but I have found this series more and more interesting. Although Friends and Heroes is the third book in the Balkan Trilogy, it ends with another evacuation and feels incomplete, so I feel compelled to read the second trilogy in the series Fortunes of War, the Levant Trilogy.

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Day 1030: Outline

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Cover for OutlineIt was hard for me to decide what I thought of Rachel Cusk’s novel, Outline. It is a difficult novel to describe and seems to be an experiment in fiction. It consists of a series of dialogues where most of the time only one side of the conversation is reported.

The almost unnamed narrator, Faye, is a writer on her way to Athens to teach a writing class. Something about her encourages the people she meets to tell her their stories. The narrator herself seems to be exploring the possibilities of passivity so that she doesn’t herself do or say much; instead, things happen to her. But not much, and that isn’t the point.

The characters’ monologues are written as little gems—sparely expressed and containing interesting intellectual ideas. But there are too many of them for me now to remember which concepts struck me. The overall effect is very cerebral, even though some of the characters express strong emotions.

I am not generally fond of monologues. It was hard for me to tell whether we are to assume that the narrator seldom speaks or whether, as one reviewer assumed, her part of the dialogue has been excised. In addition, the monologues are not written as speech but mostly as narrative, lending even more inertness to the work. I remember going to a play called “Danton’s Death” where instead of talking to each other, the characters took turns declaiming. The effect to me was a series of rants. This novel doesn’t have that effect because of the narrative. I was interested in the characters’ stories, but I wasn’t moved by them.

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Day 275: A Dead Man in Athens

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Cover for A Dead Man in AthensThe “Dead Man” series sounds interesting because of the exotic locales (Athens, Istanbul, Trieste, Tangier, Malta) and the time it is set (pre-World War I), but it proves a bit light for me. I like mysteries that are funny or have an edge, but my idea of humor doesn’t match that of many writers. This book was called “effortlessly funny,” but its humor escaped me. A Dead Man in Athens is the third in the series, and I still don’t know why the books are always named “dead man” here or there, except as possibly a suggestion of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Dead Man in Deptford. Otherwise, believe me, there is no comparison.

Sandor Seymour, a multi-lingual Scotland Yard detective, is sent out to Athens by the Foreign Office because someone has poisoned the cat of the Ottoman sultan living in exile there. The Foreign Office fears someone may be practicing for an attempt on the sultan.

Seymour soon believes that the poisoning may be simply domestic in nature, but the Foreign Office is sure it has something to do with war brewing in the Balkans. Then someone poisons the British engineer hired by the Greeks to take care of Blériot machines, early airplanes that the engineer feels could be useful to the Greeks for reconnaissance during the war.

The novel has many characters, but few are more than narrowly drawn. The mystery is not very complicated, and the absurdity of investigating the death of a cat doesn’t really carry the novel, as far as humor goes.