KEY POINTS:
My favourite part of Sea of Many Returns is quite close to the beginning, where the islanders of Ithaca discuss with one another the German and English tourists who come to visit in the early 20th century, inspired by the legend of the island's most famous inhabitant, Odysseus, he of the Trojan horse and the Iliad.
The locals watch these wealthy travellers who can afford to spend weeks grubbing through abandoned ruins in order to find a shred of evidence to bolster their side in an endless, ongoing, futile and trivial argument about the location of Odysseus' palace.
The islanders view these visitors with bemusement that is matched only by the visitors' own amazement at the locals' indifference to the life of their own local hero.
"We bend our backs to work our fields when we would rather look to the skies," one of the islanders says. "They bend their backs willingly and crawl on all fours to sift the earth."
It is only one of the more poignant meditations on the divided nature of the human race. It's a rather foggy book, with the central plotline - a family of Ithacans who flit back and forth between the islands and Australia with a consistency that gets a bit bewildering at times - obscured by dense clouds of narrative.
The characters travel incessantly - not one of them stays put on the island for more than half their life. Every voyage is used as a jumping off point for portraits of places which, while vivid, often do not serve any real purpose in advancing the narrative.
In fact it is tempting to say this book works the opposite way. The narrative, such as it is, really exists only to link these dense, dreamlike portraits.
There is nothing wrong with that. It may be what the author intended or it may not, but I really enjoyed these vivid portraits, many of them evoking societies, times or activities that have been swallowed up by history's rather brutal passage over southeastern Europe.
In a way, reading this book is almost a dreamlike experience, and it can be difficult to empathise with characters who keep disappearing under these scene sketches, but the book rewards those who keep turning the page anyway.
Sea of Many Returns
By Arnold Zable (Text $37)
* Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington writer and historian.
