There are a lot of books called The Scapegoat (including one by Manxman Hall Caine).

But this one is by Sophia Nikolaidou, and I read it because it's set in the city of her birth, Thessaloniki.

The Greek title translates literally as The Elephants Are Dancing. As we all know, when elephants dance, smaller entities get trampled. For me, that's a better, and more distinctive, title. A lot of smaller entities end up trampled in this book.

It was originally published in 2012, and Karen Emmerich's English translation (it was first the Nikolaidu novel to be translated into English) came out in 2015.

The action plays out on two parallel time tracks.

On the one hand, we have the late 1940s, and the Greek Civil War, in which pro-communist guerrillas were fighting the Greek government army (complete with its royalists and its former Nazi collaborators, according to the translator's note at the back). In some ways this was one of the opening barrages of the Cold War. The British had been involved in ousting left-wing forces from the provisional government in 1944, paving the way for conflict, and the US now backed the government. Meanwhile, the USSR offered (limited) support to the guerrillas. Times are bitter: "The two sides competed in harshness and barbarism... In the end political neutrality became a dangerous position. The country was ruled by paroxysms of fanaticism and intolerance."

In the middle of all this, in 1948, the body of Jack Talas, an American correspondent for CBS, is found in the bay off Thessaloniki. He has been murdered, and there is massive political pressure to bring someone -- someone of the right flavour, that is -- to book. ("If, God forbid," proclaims a newspaper editorial, "the perpetrators were found to be affiliated with the right, the Americans would hold the entire Greek government responsible.") The fall-guy is another journalist, Manolis Gris, the child of a Pontic Greek immigrant family. The evidence is insubstantial; the process is violence-soaked and corrupt. But Gris goes to jail for long years. He never succeeds in clearing his name. (The story of Talas and Gris is based on real events: CBS journalist George Polk was killed in exactly such unexplained circumstances, and Greek journalist Grigoris Staktopoulous took the rap, dying in 1998 without ever obtaining justice.)


"A boatman found him in the waters of the Thermaic Gulf, fifty strokes from the White Tower..."

In our story, Jack has plenty of enemies: "He'd been making a stink to people in high places in the government, because the American aid packages weren't being distributed to the families of communists in the villages." Antrikos, a friend in Athens, warns his Greek wife to restrain him. "There are certain things we just don't say," he explains. But Jack is stubborn and determined, addicted to living dangerously. He had even threatened the interior minister, alleging that "government insiders were selling arms to the rebels and stealing American aid". Nor did he spare the Americans: "Did you see what he wrote about Truman? That he was uninterested in truly aiding the Greek economy and improving living conditions among the people of Greece. All President Truman cares about, Talas wrote, is squelching the uprising. And supporting the corrupt administration... The Brits had him in their sights, too, for criticizing their policy in the Middle East."

That's one thread. On the other hand, we follow the Georgiou family as they attempt to navigate the Greece of the financial crisis. It's the academic year 2010-11. Widespread disillusionment about the point of education when jobs are rare and survival difficult leads to school sit-ins and protests (some of the chapter headings are drawn from the graffiti of the time: "Schools enlighten only when they burn," for example, or "Get your hands off our brains"). Minas Georgiou, a promising high-school student, has decided not to do the feared Panhellenic Exams, because he no longer sees any advantage in going to university (his mother, Teta, is in despair over this decision). Meanwhile, the newspaper where his father, Talas Georgiou, works is required to organize lay-offs and pay cuts; Grandmother Evthalia has had her pension cut; the family withdraw their savings from their Greek bank, and deposit them in Cyprus at low interest to safeguard Minas's university fund; and shops are going out of business. The news is full of stories of scandals and kickbacks in the administration, which is flailing hopelessly in its attempts to find a solution.


"Grandma might be right when she says Agia Sophia is the heart of the city. If you drew a circle round the city with a compass, this is definitely where you'd plant the foot"

The two time-lines are brought together when Marinos Soukiouroglou, one of the few teachers at Minas's school, it seems, who think outside the box, decides to give Minas an assignment in lieu of exam prep. He is to investigate the case of Jack Talas and Manolis Gris, reviewing and assessing all the available material. He does a thorough job, but makes no breakthroughs. He presents a summary of known events, but doesn't go out on a limb by imputing guilt or responsibility. Teacher Souk is somewhat frustrated by this stance. But why should Minas succeed where so many others have failed?

Whether it's the catalytic effect of the research exercise, or the good influence of his smart girlfriend, Evalina, Minas eventually decides he does want to do the exams after all.


"For Grandma all that really counts as Thessaloniki is the part of the city inside the Byzantine walls... Anything east of the White Tower is a foreign country as far as she's concerned"

*_*_*

One of the clever things about the book is the way these two periods illuminate each other. The opening sentence quotes a villager talking to a CBS correspondent in 1948: "Every crook in Greece is in the government." It's a sentiment that could no doubt be echoed in the 2010s.

For Souk, "History doesn't happen in outer space... History doesn't happen to other people, in a distant place and time. It's happening to us, here and now. What we're living is history." This stance is also expressed by the translator in a note at the end: "Perhaps most important are not the details of these historical settings, but the sense of history as a lived present that saturates the novel. In putting the story of Manolis Gris alongside the current crisis in Greece, Nikolaidou implicitly argues that the injustices of the past are still with us, and that scapegoating of all kinds -- of political opponents, of immigrants, of the youth who will bear the brunt of the current financial crisis, even of Greece itself within the European Union -- pervades the current moment."

Pressure from the world's powerful is an obvious parellel. The Americans pushed the Greek authorities to make an arrest in the Talas case, threatening to withdraw their backing otherwise: "Which is to say, no more dollars or napalm." (The napalm reference, it seems, is not just a rhetorical flourish.) In the later era, the pressure is for financial austerity: "Then there were tanks, now there are banks," as one chapter heading puts it.

Tasos, we're told, "tried not to take sides on the issue of foreigners coming in to help them clean up their act... In the Garden of Eden, God was boss. In the European Union it was the Central Bank."

As Nikolaidou herself underlines in an interview in 2016: "I believe that the parallels between the civil war period in Greece and the current situation in my country are simple: Both then and today basic political decisions are taken somewhere else. It’s a bit like a game of chess or monopoly. Some are playing the game, miles away from Greece, and their moves determine everything in the country."


"On his way he walked by Agia Sophia where he and Teta had gotten married. Back then, Evthalia couldn't comprehend how a born-and-bred Thessalonian could want to get married anywhere else..."

There's also the parallel of the sacrifice of the small for the sake of the big: Thomas Tzitzilis, the ruthless policeman in charge of the Talas case, is aware of the need for a result: "If we don't have a perpetrator, well, some Greek will have to sacrifice himself for the cause. It wouldn't be a terrible blow, if it meant saving the rest of the country."

Minas picks up on the same vibes in the discourse on the financial crisis: "Sure, we have to save the nation, he said in a voice dripping with irony, quoting the phrase they kept throwing around on the screen. I'm so sick of hearing that. It's just what they said when they threw Gris to the dogs. Fifty years of the same stupidity. From people who are perfectly willing to watch as other people sacrifice everything. We've hit bottom, great, we got it. But it's the same old shit all over again. Ideas about lives, the country above its people. As if that could solve the problem."


"All he saw was the sea at the end of the street, the glistening waves, the open horizon"

Then there are the family parallels between the two periods (a little too neat, some might argue). Evthalia, Minas's feisty and erudite grandmother, once caught the eye of one Nikiforos Dinopoulos (but his mother didn't like her, and arranged for him to marry another woman).

Not only was Nikiforos Gris's lawyer, but he is also the grandfather of Evelina, who becomes Minas's girlfriend.

And Froso Dinopoulos, that "arranged" wife (a "girl as silly as they come", according to Evthalia), probably held a key bit of evidence that never came to light in the official documents. She hears a man called Panayiotis, who is a nasty piece of work, boasting of having killed someone. But her mother-in-law persuades her not to do anything with this information, which might "get her son mixed up in other people's business".

Minas's father also worked on the Gris file at one point, and made some sort of breakthrough -- until he was shut down by the higher-ups. So even Dad, the honest, upright journalist, is complicit in the silencing of this affair. A year after dropping the story, he's promoted: "He deserved it, of course. He worked like a dog, anyone with eyes in his head could see that. What they didn't see were the boxes of suppressed evidence in his basement. Even he forgot, eventually -- after all, he'd made his choice. Though when Minas took on the project, for a moment his father felt tempted. Just for a moment, and then it passed."

So the Gris story involves a litany of compromises that draw in even people we have grown to regard as nice (as, we suspect, the handling of the financial crisis debacle will too).

Dinopoulos, unable to save Gris, manages to bargain the sentence down: "He'd avoided the worst, he told his conscience. What it came down to was, he's saved an innocent man from the firing squad."

Now an infirm old man, he attends Minas's research presentation (along with Tasos, Teta, and Evthalia), and comments at the end: "As with all vital decisions that affect large groups of people, you do the best thing for the greatest number. We did something for the sake of something else. It may be complicated to explain, but it's self-evident in the moment of action. Which is why a neutral assessment of the events is the safest and most honorable approach." The whole affair was best described, he said, as "a conspiracy of good intentions".


"Grandpa Dinopoulos, born in 1922... lives in a penthouse apartment on Ermou. From his veranda he can see Agia Sophia if he twists his head"

What is true is that everyone is guilty, to some degree. Marinos Soukiouroglou critiques the line Minas has taken and Dinopoulos has defended, by declaring: "In my class students are taught to take a position. Neutrality is a myth." But Minas's rejoinder goes right to the heart of the matter: "Why do you insist on laying blame? If we accuse one person, we let everyone else off the hook, and there were lots of people who played a part." Souk might not be entirely satisfied, but his student has learnt an important lesson: "Minas had come to realize that justice is an abstract concept. Perfect on paper. But in practice, riddled with qualifications, asterisks, interpretations, clashes of opinion. History books offered no catharsis, as tragedies did; there were no happy endings, as there were in fairytales or soap operas."

The novel's last section is entitled "And all that might have been". It consists of a list of "ifs", drawn from then and now, private and public, united only by the fact that they are all -- we know now -- impossible. "If Greek politicians had more backbone and the great powers less of a tendency to impose their will... If the answer were single and final. If passivity in the face of injustice were a crime, and punished as such..."

"If... Then, perhaps."

But the book doesn't end here. We end with a villager telling the CBS correspondent: "I like my country." It's spring, and the light is beautiful. "The American pressed the button. Click. He wanted to remember that moment, that place."

The villager can make that comment, despite the dire nature of the broader context. Perhaps in every era, however bleak, there are such moments, such places. Life is really only moments, after all.

*_*_*

What else? Well, there's a bit more history to note.

There's more, for example, on the Pontic Greeks, and the great population swap that we heard so much about in Kapka Kassabova's Border. Manolis Gris's family were from Trapezounta/Trabzon; his father was killed, his mother forced to flee. They arrived in Salonica, where they were not necessarily welcomed. Gris's mother recalls: "Later on they'd come and say, You folks were rich, you had money. You came with gold coins sewn into the hems of your dresses, whole fortunes. Whoever hasn't lived the life of a refugee has easy words to speak."


The Memorial to Pontic Greeks, June 2019

Hovering behind Minas's fulfilment of his task, there is also an interesting discussion on history, research, and interpretation.

Souk's experience of postmodern interpretations of history leave him somewhat on the fence. He learns to be "even more suspicious in the face of what was commonly known as truth". Yet he also suspects that postmodernism adds up to something that is "not much more than intellectual gymnastics", and doubts the wisdom in "radical skepticism". (Interestingly, Marie-Janine Calic, in A History of Yugoslavia, also suggests postmodernism might not have been helpful in the context of that 1990s conflict: "Intellectuals renounced key fundamental certainties of the industrial age, such as modernity, progress, and the future.")

Yet the constructed nature of what we understand as history comes through again and again. Minas struggles to make sense of the sources about Gris. But he realizes where the problem lies: "I'm not studying the events, I'm looking for easy connections between them, to get it over with. I'm not letting them speak, I'm trying to speak for them. If Dad had ears to hear, I'd tell him that journalism does exactly the same thing, even if it doesn't like to think so. It takes events and wraps them up in its own voice."

Nikiforos Dinopoulos reaches a similar conclusion, although he approaches the question from a much more cynical direction: "I lived through two wars and witnessed plenty of military tribunals, and the idea that reality is single and undeniable amuses me. Reality is the ultimate construction -- just ask the lawyers and journalists, whose careers rest on that construction... Historians show up after the fact. They rummage through locked drawers, discover forgotten papers, conduct their research, pass judgment... In history there is no such thing as progress, change, advancing toward the good or sinking into the abyss... Before and after. That's all there is. And between, a chasm.".



*_*_*

Overall, this novel worked. I loved the themes: History; justice; education... I thought the characters were interesting, particularly the father, grandmother, and teacher (Tasos, Evthalia, and Marinos). I enjoyed the descriptions of Thessaloniki, a city I would love to get to know better. And I liked the ending. If... If...

Of the negatives, for me the most significant was the fragmentary narrative form, which continually switched from point of view to point of view. Of course, the clamour of different voices adds depth to the narration. But the format became a little frustrating after a while, especially as the fragments become shorter and shorter, and the viewpoint switches ever faster.

The sections written from a specific point of view intersected with omniscient-narrator sections that were rather creakily labelled "Through other eyes". That device felt a little wooden to me.

And towards the end, it felt a tad too didactic in places.

A very absorbing read, though. Thought-provoking and saddening.