John Harvey's New Novel

Coup d'etat by John Harvey. Collins. £9.95 hardback.

THE TLS REVIEWER OF Coup d'etat (18.1.85) ended with a satirical
portrait of the author gazing from his rooms in Emmanuel at a
vision of airport bookstalls with the novel on conspicuous display.
Coup d'etat may indeed prove a best-seller. It begins, like the novels
of Geoffrey Archer, in medias res on the morning of April 1967 when a
group of Greek intelligence officers applied a NATO contingency
plan and took over the machinery of state; it presents itself as a
realistic and detailed chronicle of recent history (Archbishop
Makarios and even Harold Wilson and James Callaghan feature
among the dramatis personae); it contains scenes of intimate sexuality
and of hideous violence during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and
when one of the principal characters is tortured by the Greek
military police; while the confiding narrator throughout plays his
role with unobtrusive efficiency. Yes, in other words, but what the
TLS reviewer failed to point out was why, in the 1980s, conformity
with the conventions of the best-seller constitutes in itself grounds
for dismissal.
It is, of course, an extraordinarily ambitious novel and not merely
because of its length or in the sense that the TLS reviewer implied.
The word 'Tolstoyan' comes perhaps too easily to mind but before
rejecting it, there may be some point in considering the novel's more
obviously Tolstoyan features: the ambition to convey the history of
an epoch in a nation's history and especially as lived by three
families related by ties of blood and marriage and caught up in the
drama of events; the free and unobtrusive use of narrative
convention and the corresponding directness of appeal to the
common reader on whose existence and civilized humanity the
narrator implicitly and unselfconsciously relies. There may be some
point too in recalling what Mr Harvey wrote some years ago in this
journal, of War and Peace in a review of a book by R. F. Christian:
Professor Christian's book is invaluable for the stress it places on
the lucidity of Tolstoy's prose; yet I find it more difficult than he
does to say that War and Peace as a whole has integrity. This is not
a new criticism, but it is made with personal feeling, for since
discovering War and Peace, I have constantly gone back to it to
find virtually every kind of touchstone for the supreme exercise of

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fiction; and yet, with further reading, the feeling grows that
Tolstoy released the novel before it had completely found
itself. . . (V, ii, 1970, p. 123)
Harvey's criticisms of Tolstoy, one can now see, is that of the
practitioner; both his enthusiastic respect and his misgivings are
those of someone who sees himself as engaged in the same 'supreme
exercise'. To make an invidious but convenient comparison, his
devotion to the art of fiction is different in kind from that of John
Fowles in the conventions of fiction as such, those of Victorian
narrative and mediaeval romance. Nor is his Greece die elegandy
contrived but conventionally idealised world of The Magus.
How far he succeeds in conveying die intimate flavour and reality
of modern Greece, given the nature of his undertaking, is a measure
of his ultimate success and an English reviewer is not, of course, the
best person to offer a judgement of diis. In so far as I can judge from
my own very limited experience of Greece and of Greek family life, I
feel like saying, none the less, diat he has succeeded extraordinarily
well. In fact, I found his Greeks more real and more recognisable
than the English factory workers in his first novel, The Plate Shop, of
1979. Some of die strain of the writing in the latter can be attributed
perhaps to diat very freedom of audiorial perspective to which I
have already referred; to die absence, except momentarily, of a
sustained viewpoint which is that of the individual consciousness.
We are given, in direct speech, his workers' banter and abuse; we
are shown in minute detail their skills and routines, as well as their
conflicts and catastrophes, including die eventual take-over of die
factory, that brings the novel to an end. The novel deserved the
David Higham award it received, if for no other reason because of its
documentary value, its Zolaesque scrupulousness of observation and
its (again Zolaesque) sense of the pictorial. It is not, however,
Sturt's Wheelwright's Shop or Surrey Labourer brought up to date. Not
only is die England of the Plate Shop utterly different from that of
Sturt's Victorian and Edwardian Surrey. Harvey writes of his
factory workers with respect but widi nodiing like Sturt's lingering
reverence, his Ruskinian sense of dieir superiority to himself. It is
perhaps significant, in fact, diat it is not an English worker but his
immigrant Czech plater, dismissed after a row widi the foreman and
sitting shocked with his family in the litde garden he has made out of
die back yard of his house, whose perceptions are shown in this
novel widi somediing approaching sustained inwardness. The
omniscient and ubiquitous narrator is a more obtrusive presence
dian in Coup d'etat; the equivalent, almost, of a wartime official
artist. Indeed, die achievement of die novel lies pardy in making a
corner of modern industrial England seem both typical and

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bizarrely strange. A somewhat similar (unTolstoyan) distancing
occurs in Coup d'etat, when we are given a brief glimpse of the
Turkish Prime Minister in London appealing to Harold Wilson and
James Callaghan to take action against the attempted Greek
annexation of Cyprus or else allow the Turkish army to do so. This
brief, though historically crucial episode reads like part of a film
screen-play. After the Turkish Prime Minister has left, we are told,
. . . any watcher outside would sec two pale faces swim
slowly to the window.
'We could stop them if we wanted.'
The one turns sharply to the other, 'A foreign adventure?
'Are you joking?'
The faces turn again; to where, before them, darkness thickens
round a group of statues huddled in the crouched corner of a
pediment: faces showing white in the hard soot round them, like
pictures of bleached fear in the blast... (p. 444-).
If the poetic and pictorial effect here seems precarious, it is partly
perhaps because it would have been diminished had the two
statesmen, whose identities in this context are unmistakable, been
named. This is dangerously near to a lapse into procede.
As a novelist, in fact, Mr Harvey has until now appeared to be far
more at home in Greece than in England. He observes Greek
domestic customs and rituals with amusement and relish and yet
not, in any way that I have noticed myself, as a foreign observer.
This is the kind of thing Greeks like to joke about as well. I am
thinking, for example, of the host stripping down on a hot day to his
underwear when he comes home from work, before unselfconsciously
greeting his sister-in-law, who has arrived for lunch; of the
unannounced visit and offering of a rare brandy and fine gossamer
dress material to cousins from whom a favour is solicited and of the
use to which the best piece of melon may be put to bring peace, after
a blazing political row, between a wife's husband and sister at table.
The shooting expedition in which Leonidas, the would-be minister,
patronises and wins the favour of the Minister of Coordination
(1,4) could be mistaken for a first-hand eye-witness account. The
hunt is a farce, considered as a piece of sport and especially when we
think of the marvellous hunting and shooting expeditions in
Tolstoy. Unlike Levin's dogs, whining before daybreak to be on the
scent, the organiser's wretched hound skulks to avoid being locked
in the boot of a car. Yet this is not a farce in any literary sense, not a
parody of Tolstoy. The parody lies in the occasion not the telling.
The hunt turns out to be an opportunity for the display of
amateurish Greek machismo. Much retsina and roasted lamb are

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consumed, there is much dangerous driving along mountain roads
and at the end of the day, as the hunters vainly beat the bushes for
hares, Leonidas' son watches,
his earlier excitement . . . exhausted by the sight of too many
blind bulge-eyed heads hanging crooked from plump throbbing
bodies. And he saw his father grinning like a crocodile, full of sly
pleasure; he had obviously caught whatever he had been hunting
for. All Alexis' dislike of him boiled and swelled. He watched
now while this slope of stones became peopled with farmers,
businessmen, his father and his father's friend, the local
policeman, a government minister also — separate men, they
stalked plants, shouted 'hup!' or 'hey!' at a bush, and if the bush
didn't answer they threw a stone at it, and moved on to the next,
like men with mad hopes' (p. 75)
This is not procede, by which I mean that it is one of many episodes
in the novel in which the general and particular, what is experienced
by the actors in the drama and what that experience portends, have
come into equilibrium. Alexis' vision of the hunters, which is here
the narrator's, though conveyed with leisurely loathing, is faithful
both to what the eye would take in and to the hunters' mood. This
makes the closing sentence all the more ominous, as well as
rhythmically alive.
One of the many aspects of Greek life which fascinate Mr Harvey
is the predatory instinct; at its most highly developed in Leonidas,
but expert and unashamed in the most likeable of the characters to a
degree rarely conceivable in'England. Greece, he reminds us, far
more than England, is the home of private enterprise. When the two
sisters, divided by the politics of their husbands, join forces to
prevent their father, an ageing Salonika merchant, investing the
family fortune in an unsellable cargo of plastic shoes and toys, they
confront him in a quayside taverna and during the long hours they
sit together, his cunning evasiveness and absurd merchandise
become the expression of desperate failing powers (1,3). There is
perhaps a clue to Mr Harvey's fascination with Greece and to the
confidence he communicates to the reader in the reality of his
Hellenic world in an observation by Michael, his English journalist
as he recalls one of the two sisters, Chryssa, during her student days
in England:
He remembered her being Dr Zhivago, Julie Christie and Garbo
by turns, in someone else's swaggering fur coat; he saw her
braced mobile stance turning this way and that as she argued
politics with several people at once, and kept them all at bay. He
saw her serious, insisting face, arguing with him about King Lear,

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till it occurred to him that Greece was more like old England than
modern England was . . . (p. 191)
What is certain is that Harvey's modern Greece, like the brutal
England of King Lear, offers full scope for the exercise of the moral
sensibility in a way that it is difficult to imagine in a novel written
about modern England or, for that matter, Greece since the return
to parliamentary civilian rule. Of the wickedness as well as the
stupidity of the Colonels' dictatorship we are left in no doubt; while
the sycophancy and opportunism of the would-be minister Leonidas
are so unrestrained and self-righteous as to call for little comment.
He is presented throughout with comic gusto. He is one of Greece's
'pashas' and, as such, is incorrigible; which makes him the hero of a
series of what the BBC Kaleidoscope critic described as 'cameos', but
which I should prefer to call, borrowing the term from Stendhal,
'scenes probantes. . . scenes qui prouvent les caracteres ou les
passions des personnages qui y sont engages.' These are all the
more accomplished and inventive in that they are wholly conceivable.
I am thinking, for example, of Leonidas' cunning patronising of his
own future patron during the shooting expedition and of the
appalling scene in which he tries to bulldoze a path from his new
villa to the previously unspoiled beach below.
In such a world as this we can expect to find not only a Leonidas
but the modern counterparts of Kent and Gloucester. At the centre
of the novel is the ordeal of Chryssa's husband Vangelis, a lawyer
who despairs of the law when he is informed officially diat he has
withdrawn from the defence of a victim of the regime, joins the
clandestine resistance and after his arrest, resists the army's
attempts to extract from him the names of his fellow-conspirators.
Mr Harvey is not the first person to have asked himself how he
would behave under torture. (The bladed phalanga, designed for
the treatment of syphilis, is here one of the interrogator's instruments.)
The episode can be read as an answer to this question and as a piece
of extraordinarily imaginative thinking about the very sources of
morality. Vangelis' fight to protect his friends and maintain his
integrity becomes in his own mind the cunning defence of
fortifications under siege. He is able, with the utmost effort, to make
his way back to them when he is tricked into believing that he may
have inadvertently betrayed the group and to draw strength, like
Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, from moments of respite and
relaxation:
Within an hour he was dragged back to his cell and dumped in
pieces of pain on the floor. Later an orderly came and shouted
through the door 'What do you want?' He meant, to eat - he was
going to the canteen.

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Vangelis moaned, then answered, 'Steak': his request was
always, in some form, for meat.
The man went away, and was gone a long time. But later the
door was banged open briefly, and something was chucked in.
Vangelis crawled to it: it was, as every day, a congealed chunk of
macaroni, which, as every day, had been thrown in so that it spilt
out of the scrap of paper that held it, and was scattered in the
dirt. Vangelis gathered it as best he could, and lingered on each
mouthful: it was his dinner, he must try to enjoy it. And he had
for relish the knowledge that, still, he had held his line . . .
(p. 108)
As Mr Harvey clearly knows, the imagination as such cannot
reproduce the sensations of physical pain but it can tell us something
of the form pain might take and the meaning it may assume; though
this entails necessarily taking into account as well the resources of
the human spirit.
The other question: how can men torture? is one to which the
novel, perhaps inevitably, offers a less clear answer. Harvey's
interrogators are perfectly vraisemblables, especially when during his
trial they sit 'clean shaven and clean, their uniforms new and
smart . . .', one of them 'like a virtuous boy at Sunday School, his
feet tucked under the bench, his back upright, his brows slightly
knit, his round face patient but hurt. . .' (pp. 134—5). He
remains none the less a human enigma; and the nearest we come to
an answer to this second question is when we are shown Archbishop
Makarios just before the attempt on his life, engineered by the Greek
army, receiving advance intelligence to this effect:
The summer evening quickly grew dark, and the family took its
leave. The Archbishop went indoors, and was preparing with his
chaplain for the prayers of the evening when the Secretary was
announced again. He hurried in without formality, his face had a
glare of elation and shock.
'We have the information, Your Beautitude!'
He spoke excitedly, his words tripped: for the prisoner had
been a wild spark, and yet all at once, as they worked harder on
him, he gave in. He lay now in a heap as though he had no
bones, his pride extinct. The Secretary confined himself to giving
the Archbishop the information he wanted, with no word on how
it was obtained.
Which information the Archbishop took in with no change of
expression: he was a still pool in which huge things sank without
trace. But when the Secretary left he breathed a deep thanksgiving,
and his head sank in reverence. He knew now all that he needed
to know: and the guidance he prayed for was given with that
knowledge.

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He joined the chaplain and the waiting priests, and presently
their voices rose in a long rippling climbing chant. . .
(pp. 415-6)
The viewpoint if not of the torturers, of other members of the Greek
army, is one we are given repeatedly throughout and right up to the
time of the tragic fiasco in Cyprus. We are shown the army
commander whose tanks brought down the dictatorship refusing to
cross the River Evros into Turkey and it is through the eyes of
Kostas, Leonidas' cousin, die ambitious and idealistic but embittered
army adjudant, that much of the military action is seen. If Kostas'
view of things carries less weight than that of other characters in the
novel, this may be pardy because he lacks intelligence, though this is
not die only reason - diere is a sense in which Tolstoy's Nikolay
Rostov also lacks intelligence; but he has the virtues of his
unquestioning conservatism and can give up thrashing his servants
out of respect for his wife. Kostas remains throughout too
exclusively the embittered idealistic schoolboy. And the 'great idea'
by which he and his fellow-officers are moved; that of retaking
Constantinople and avenging the disaster and defeat of 1922, is
made to seem throughout merely a kind of madness; which,
presumably, it is, though it is also a madness with a history if not a
cure. Mr Harvey presents his Greek officers well: die extraordinary
rigidity and fanaticism even of diose opposed to the dictatorship and
loyal to die king and die moral alibis sanctioned by die inhuman
military pose. What I missed was the army's sense - not
inconceivable, if one goes back to 'old England' - of dieir finding
diemselves in what is sdll for a Greek or a Greek Cypriot the front
line of a direatened Christendom. Only in the Cyprus chapters are
we given some idea of the profoundly spiritual and audioritarian
hold on Greek life of the Orthodox Church.
Coup d'etat fails to fulfil completely or come near even to fulfilling
its ambitions and it would, of course, be a piece of extraordinary
news if it had. Of War and Peace too Mr Harvey wrote, in his review:
'After seven years' intensive work, there may have been many
reasons why Tolstoy was right to make an end, and start somediing
else; even if the novel was still fluid . . .' (p. 123). The 'fluidity' of
Coup d'etat is concealed, I diink somewhat ineffectually, by its over-
rigid and arbitrary form. There is no particular reason, given the
personal and family dramas, why die novel should end with die fall
of die dictators and die joyful return of democracy. Its lapses into
what reads like an imaginative screen-play for a television reconsti-
tution of history and the over-excited attention diis demands (e.g.
die Wilson and Callaghan episode) are again an unsatisfactory
response to the all-important problem of form; which is also, in a

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novel of this kind, the problem of historical meaning. Unsatisfactory
too, I find, is the presence tar too near the centre of the novel of the
English journalist Michael, a civilised and somewhat donnish figure
whose scruples and immense respect for Vangelis prove no obstacle,
while Vangelis is in prison, to Michael's seducing Chryssa his wife.
Mr Harvey is a moralist but a moralist of the post-war European
world; that is, a writer for whom personal morality becomes real
especially when it coincides with matters of public concern.
Michael's adoration of Chryssa ('To him Chryssa was Greece . . .',
p. 191) I found, on the whole, embarrassing; all the more so in that
the narrator, as in the passage quoted earlier, goes into excessive
and self-devaluating detail about her unique attractiveness. To
convey such intense and poignant admiration in prose or verse is
notoriously difficult, perhaps today more than ever before ('Le
discours amoureux', as Roland Barthes reminds us 'est aujourd'hui
d'une extreme solitude.'); though it was the problem by which even
Stendhal was haunted when creating the character of Mme de
Chasteller in Lucien Leuwen. It is not that Mr Harvey lacks the
ability to convey what can seem like a deep attraction and
attachment. The story of Chryssa's married life is told movingly
and with an unfailing sense of the continuities of everyday life;
despite the way the marriage is undermined by Vangelis' work
against the regime before being turned to near bereavement by his
arrest and long imprisonment. If nothing in these episodes seems
embarrassing or gratuitous, it is perhaps because the events of the
marriage are shown as giving content and meaning to historical
time. (Compare Chryssa's 'This is stolen time . . .', when she
makes love with Michael.) Why Mr Harvey needed his English
journalist is by no means clear. Even artistically, he is a less
substantial figure than Leonidas or Vangelis, more perfunctorily
sketched. It is possible that Mr Harvey wanted an English witness
to explain or justify his own absorption in Greek affairs; though if so,
Michael is again unnecessary. The most dramatic and moving
episodes in the novel take place when Michael is not even there.
What is achieved in these episodes is impressive by any standards,
including those Mr Harvey had in mind when he wrote in his article
on Tolstoy of 'the supreme exercise of fiction'; and even should a
Greek tell us that this is not the real Greece, like those Italians
whom Croce is happy to report as opining that Stendhal's Italy in La
Chartreuse de Panne is merely the 'Italy of a dream'. I have described
Mr Harvey as ambitious. I mean by this unusually dedicated. I
regard it as a cause for gratitude that so dedicated and accomplished
a writer should be among our contemporaries; and as justifying a
certain feeling of awe. Mr Harvey is not alone in believing that
literature can give meaning to life by representing reality, a view

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which many of his fellow academics, including literary academics,
profess to despise. He is, however, unusual in the single-mindedness
with which he seems prepared to ac{ on this belie