I’m not altogether keen on hardback books: very expensive, very heavy and somehow they feel very self important. They are certainly not books that I can read in the bath! The problem is that I have to wait usually at least 6 months for a new book to appear in paperback. Normally I can be patient and wait. Just occasionally I really can’t.
A new book by Victoria Hislop is cause for some celebration and so, dear reader, I bought the hardback!
Victoria Hislop is the writer of many bestselling stories set in her beloved Greece, as well as a few concerned with lands further afield, particularly Granada in Spain. Greece has had a long and difficult history, and through the 20th century into the present times those dramatic, emotional and sometimes aggressive periods have continued. All this provides excellent material for any novelist, particularly one with a very Greek sort of passion for the country, including all its islands.
In 2020 the author was made an honorary citizen of Greece. Honorary? Does that mean she is a citizen or not I wonder and more interestingly she is on the British Committee for the reunification of the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles. This is a subject that has suddenly become very topical. The new Victoria Hislop book was written before the present very political situation but it is, by chance, very relevant to the plot.
So, we are in the late 1960s, when after political and economic chaos in the decades following the Second World War, a repressive and violent military junta is in power (nicknamed ‘the Colonels’) who are prepared to put down the communist party by any means at all, including torture and execution. Our main character Helena, who lives with her Greek mother and Scottish father in East Anglia, spends her childhood summers in Athens with her maternal grandparents. As the years pass, her relationships with her grandmother and the diminutive housekeeper deepen but her grandfather scares her slightly and makes her uncomfortable. As a teenager and student she begins to make sense of these feelings and tensions and realises that her grandfather is a general in the military government and he is the reason that her mother will not return to holiday in Greece.
On an ill advised student summer on a remote Greek island, helping with an archaeological dig and following an also ill advised love interest, Helena learns of the lucrative and secretive trade in Grecian antiquities. Activities that appeared simple and straightforward suddenly become complicated and surrounded by difficult moral questions. At this point Victoria Hislop leaves the reader to sort out for themselves when payment is in fact bribery, when stealing is just that and when maybe it is acceptable in a case of survival, particularly when what is being stolen is being dug from the earth. What do individuals own and can therefore choose to sell and what actually belongs to a country and should live in a museum? This is all before we move onto what is real and what is fake! The appropriation and acquisition of cultural treasures is muddied by the colonial past and hence (just to add to the British Museum’s difficult year) the Elgin Marbles is a case in point, which has simmered away under the surface for very many years and then suddenly reaches boiling point. I suspect it is not hard to guess Victoria Hislop’s opinion on this situation.
This author has proved she is skilled and experienced at crafting a story with a plot that is rich and satisfying, based on deep and careful historical research. Her characters are rounded, well developed and believable, whether they are British or Greek. I enjoyed reading this book immensely.