Review: The Green Shore, by Natalie Bakopoulos

This book was recommended to me by the poster formerly known as august (he among the quiet friends) back in, well, August, in the context of swapping around review sites. I bought it and cracked it open shortly afterward, and while I feel somewhat guilty about taking so long to actually finish the thing, it is, in all honestly, the sort of novel that is well-suited to reading in morsels like that.  It is told in several largely atmospheric segments, rich in narrative commentary, each one separated by several years. Things happen within each section, but it's not driven as a simple narrative, no hard-pressing plot advancement, not a matter of this-then-this-then-that. The Green Shore is more of an exploration of several sequential presents, each of which has proceeded naturally from the last.  You can read one of these portraits, let it absorb, and then get back later to see how the characters have changed and developed during the year or two they were offscreen.  It's somewhat like spending a few weeks at a time with distant friends, a little more like visiting your distant family.

The book follows the lives of one extended family of Athens, in the months and years after the Greek coup in 1967. There is a fairly large cast involved for a book this short, but the two daughters (Sophie and Anna), their mother (Eleni), and her brother (Mihalis) are the point-of-view characters, the interior and exterior lives of each one pulled out and elaborated in each section. They are, with varying levels of extroversion and personal compromise, instinctively subersive, liberal, urbane, and in their respective ways, they find themselves natural opponents of the colonels. As well as each other. Quite a lot of the narrative is developing the thorny relationship space they all share with one another. We find them first on the night of the coup, one in the middle of an affair, one drunk, two living worlds apart at home, and then the coup happens.

Bakopoulos is masterful at creating a kind of hollow, amorphous tension through these four. There's a sense of menace everywhere, of distrust, but as conditions evolve, after initial violence and mass arrests, and a few days of quiet, wary streets and strange radio broadcasts, life returns to most of its modern motions. The family is on the brink of several underground movements--Sophie is dating a dissident; Mihalis is an experienced one, who resisted the Nazi occupation--and they get closer to them as the years pass, but at first their first efforts seem less than futile under the distrustful eyes of newly-minted authorities, and then surreal against the token normalcy, the sham society, that follows. The sources of the paranoia are rarely witnessed directly, but are implied everywhere: an overly curious security guard, cautious conversations, prisons packed away on quaint vacation islands. We see detention and demoralization, and Eleni eventually starts a clinic that serves torture victims, but even at the climactic Polytechnic uprising, most (though by now, not all) of the action is in the form of intimidation, and then we only see damaged bodies being rushed back and forth. It's actually a very compelling and intimate expression of how oppressive power filters down, how constriction of freedom feels, and this book is well worth reading for that.  It's like It Can't Happen Here, but told with real, complex people, in a real, living place.

The general arc of the story scatters the family, and then gradually pulls them back together. They are all characters who mature under the occupation, come into their own.  They all start out a bit feckless, a little lost, but they grow in resolve, and it is as if they need the threat of the authorities to complete themselves, but only to a believable human degree. Anna is really the only one who can be said to grow up under the junta, and of all of them, she is the one who cracks the boundaries of decorum the most, the student who becomes the full-fledged revolutionary. Arguably Greece lost and found its purpose similarly over these years, which was probably an intentional parallel (with the country left as ambiguous a future as after any family reunion). The ending feels like nothing more than a fitting moment to stop, and as such, I wonder the characters do as their lives continue.  Dissolve again, become dissolute.  Lose purpose and fade out, I think, for better or worse.  But then we all do.