Once a Greek by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Love in the Ruins

Arnolph Archilochos lives in a shabby but entirely orderly Swiss universe defined by icon-like photographs of his moral heroes: the president, the bishop, the owner of his firm, a fashionable portrait-painter, the American Ambassador, a lawyer, various others connected with the Old New Presbyterian Penultimate Christians... and his brother Bibi, the gangster. These photographs are his only possessions: The certainties of State, Religion, Law, Art and Family. They are all he needs; his devotion to these ideals sustains him.
 
One day he is "an insignificant particle in the grey stream of humanity." The next he is swept off his feet by a beautiful young woman. All his moral certainties appear to be confirmed instantly in the presence of this woman who gives to Arnolph a sort of bourgeois respectability for which he has secretly yearned. There is an obvious interpretation of such an event: It is a fateful gift from the gods. Arnolph becomes an inverse of the biblical Job, propelled from obscurity to riches. But no less confused about his fortune than Job was about the loss of his.

Durrenmatt has written a fairy tale set in Geneva but appropriate generally to the modern world. After all, Geneva is a place where the important institutions of modern life intersect: the military (NATO), religion (the Geneva Bible), international politics (the World Health Organisation), industry (MNC’s dominate the economy in Geneva and Vaud), even terrorism (The Geneva Convention of 1937). This world suddenly and mysteriously opens to Arnolph and he rises at remarkable speed in the corporate hierarchy of the Petit-Paysan Engineering Works (makers of obstetrical forceps and atomic cannons, thus serving the world from birth to death it might be said). As one of his new minions puts it, "Like an eagle you soar above the heads of us wonder-struck Chief Bookkeepers, into the empyrean."

Closer acquaintance with his moral paragons, of course, breeds growing contempt for their superiority. The head of the firm is a vacuous moron; the bishop smokes and drinks, the painter uses nude models; Arnolph's new wealth only serves to further debauch his brother's family. And much worse ensues. Disillusion is an extreme emotion, calling for extreme action even for the most phlegmatic of men. What happens when the certainties crumble? Where does the true believer turn? Does "clear-eyed love" overcome history and social convention? 

Durrenmatt, in his typical fashion, challenges the presumptions of the 'good life'. Perhaps the authentic good life is to be found in the ancient soil of Greece, buried under layers of Christian civilisation and middle-class prejudice. Archilochus, after all, was the great poet reputed to have promoted the cult of Dionysus in the 7th century BCE. Perhaps a modern Archilochus can find similar consolations.

View all my reviews