This epic of a book is set during and after the occupation of Greece during and after the Second World War.

De Bernières has masterfully woven a huge cast of characters and multiple plot threads through a decades-long story. Some people say the last third of the book, when time begins to skip ahead faster, is perfunctory and unnecessary, but for me this is when the setup of the first two thirds begins to pay off, when the weight of time and memories hits home. In particular, as characters and objects reappear near the end of the novel after an absence of many years, their emotional significance is able to be re-evaluated and re-contextualised in a powerful way.

The language of the book, somehow combining a heightened sense of reality, matter-of-fact statements, a fairytale quality, understatement, overstatement, naïveté and comical sesquipedalian loquaciousness, is unique and draws the reader in. The omnipotent and highly opinionated narrator is used to great effect.

The author also does a fantastic job of conveying the horrors of war in a shocking and visceral fashion. 

The main issue I have with the novel is the extreme distortion of history and the political messages that are conveyed using this distorted version of events. Without going into every detail, the following are some of the more impactful inaccuracies.

The leader of the communist resistance suggests that the Greek king George and prime minister Metaxas were fascist sympathisers. This idea is treated by the novel as evidence that the Communist rebels are liars and fanatics. However, it is simply historical fact that Metaxas was not the prime minister, but a general and a dictator. Prior to the war and with the support of the king, he rounded up members and supporters of the Communist Party, put them into camps and tortured them. His emblem was the fascist axe and a crown.

The narrator claims that the partisans (andartes) failed to provide any resistance to the Italian or German occupations, fought amongst themselves and grew fat off food stolen from the peasants (whom they frequently executed as ‘collaborators’), only emerging later to set up set up a dictatorship and concentration camps the second the Germans left Greece. This is an almost total reversal of historical fact. Whilst it is true there was some political infighting between the different groups of partisans (the Stalinist politics of the Communists led to practice that was far from perfect), the majority of their efforts were directed to fighting the occupation. This is why the Italians and Germans were only able to hold the coastal towns—the partisans had almost complete hegemony over the countryside and were supported by almost all the peasants. By the time of the Greek Civil War, the Communist partisans could count on formal support from over two million peasants. Instead it was the royalists, the Greek government (who until six weeks before had been collaborating with the Nazis) and the far-right Organisation X (and supported by the British), who swept through the countryside during the Civil War massacring peasants for supporting the Communists, setting up concentration camps for Communists and partisans, using napalm to clear partisans out of the hills, and firing live ammunition into left-wing protests in the towns.

The book claims that during the Civil War the Communists kidnapped children to brainwash them while the Queen evacuated children into holiday camps. This is at best a half-truth, and at worst another complete reversal of the facts. In reality, it seems that multiple forces, including the Queen, the Greek Government, and the Communists, all forcibly removed children and all attempted to indoctrinate them into various ideologies (the Greek Civil War is really messed up).

The narrator claims that after Mussolini was overthrown he was replaced by Marshal Badoglio as the orders of King Victor Emmanuel III, a lovely fellow who was against the war. This is a mangling of the historical record, and fails to mention several important key points. Both the King and Marshal Badoglio were fascists. It was the King who had originally placed Mussolini in power (the March on Rome being purely symbolic). General B was a rabid anti-communist who, upon taking power, carried out massacres of left-wing workers and activists, the same people who had overthrown Mussolini. The King and General Badoglio changed sides not because they had any moral disagreement with the Nazis, but because they realigned themselves with the British, who had no qualms about working alongside fascists.

It is mentioned briefly in the book that Pelagia’s daughter gets locked up by the Colonels in the late-60s-early-70s. However, no context is provided for this. It is impossible to understand the dictatorship of the Colonels without understanding the Civil War and the impact of the defeat of the Communists and the wider Left, who had the popular support of the Greek working class and peasantry. If the forces that came out on top in WWII were as wonderful as the book portrays them, why was the Greek state so right-wing in the post-war period that even small steps towards liberalisation in the 60s led to a far-right military coup and junta? It speaks to just how right-wing the Greek state was that such a small step towards liberalisation was so threatening to the establishment. The book fails to portray the political climate between the Civil War and the Junta, as well as failing to portray the brutal reality of the Junta itself, and the heroic struggles of students and workers who finally managed to overthrow the Colonels.

Multiple times in the novel, it is conveyed that Mussolini and the Italian Generals are mad and incompetent, and that it is madness and incompetence that are the causes of all the horrors of the war. If Mussolini wasn’t insane and tactically inept, according to the book, he would never have gone to war, or at least would have carried it out in a more sensible and chivalrous fashion—invading the right countries at the right time, instead of overextending his forces on failed invasions. (Meanwhile the war crimes carried out by the Nazis are explained by their inherently too-logical Teutonic nature.) In reality, both Mussolini and Hitler had very sensible reasons for carrying out the war—their countries had entered the imperialist race late compared to Britain, and therefore in order to grow their economies they needed to grow their empires to try and rival Britain’s globe-spanning empire. This is obviously not to excuse the crimes of the fascists or the horrors of war, quite the opposite—it is to understand that fascism and war are not the result of the character traits of individual leaders, but due to the system of capitalism. Similarly, the author clearly conveys their belief that the British and Americans, despite events such as bombing fleeing Italian troops or the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the “good guys” of the Second World War, and were fighting against fascism. However, the British and US ruling classes, including Winston Churchill and the British Royal Family, were totally supportive of fascism, very happy with its killing of Jews, fighting communism and crushing working class resistance to capitalism. Their reasoning for fighting the war was to stop Germany from growing its empire. Both sides of the imperialist conflict wanted to make sure at the end of the war their slice of the carved-up globe was the biggest. The only heroes of the war were the partisans and anti-fascists in each country who actually opposed fascism, and small groups that opposed the war. To get rid of war and fascism, it is necessary to get rid of capitalism.

The message of the book seemed to be that terrible things just happen because some people are simply insane or incompetent, or that they simply happen for no reason, but that we can still enjoy life if we focus on the good things and not the bad things. I think this is a bad lesson to learn.

The horrors of The Second World War were not inevitable. The real lesson to learn of this period is the failures of the Stalinised Communist parties that failed to oppose the war. While the First World War was ended when revolutions in Russia and Germany led to their armies refusing to fight and their workers downing tools and bringing the war industries to a halt, this didn’t happen in the Second World War. The Stalinised Communist Parties also failed to take advantage of the radical upsurges of the 60s and 70s, often holding back the struggles of students and workers.

The lesson to learn is summarised by these quotes from two leading revolutionaries during the First World War, who suggest that the beauty of life can be appreciated while at the same time working to end the system of capitalism which creates its horrors.

Firstly from Leon Trotsky: “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

And from Rosa Luxemburg: “To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life ‘on the giant scales of fate’ if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”