Panos Karnezis: The Maze

Reviewed by FEDERICO MONSALVE

It's 1922 in the Anatolian desert of western Turkey. A small Greek battalion remains trapped by yellowish dunes and sand storms, the romanticised memories of home and an increasing desperation for survival or death - whichever will be more comforting and arrives quickest.

Their leader, Brigadier Nestor - a man given to quoting Greek mythology - is consumed by the nightmares of a massacre he helped to commit and by the morphine he has chosen as a cure for his patriotic sins.

Their priest is increasingly obsessed with the artefacts of his religion rather than spirituality itself, and somewhere among the ranks there is a red saboteur.

Initially, The Maze presents the Anatolian desert as fertile with intrigue and desolate war tales; yet it moves slowly and nowhere in particular, other than into a small town whose characters seem directly transplanted from Garcia Marquez' Macondo: the loveless prostitute, the benevolent poor, the caricaturesque mayor.

Karnezis, whose debut short-story collection, Little Infamies, was hailed by Annie Proulx as "the literary find of the year", here fictionalises the Greco-Turkish War, loosely borrowing the factual and visual skeleton of the era and constructing a novel that tries to encompass the universal elements of the conflict.

Unfortunately, in his effort to be universal (and film-script ready?) every character in the troop seems a racially and emotionally nondescript G.I. Joe made of removable plastic parts. Shallow characterisation alone makes it difficult to believe the plot, grasp completely the plight of the battalion or be immersed in a story that has magnificent sparks of storytelling.

Karnezis' promise lies undoubtedly in melody and metaphor. He is capable of such brilliant one-liners as: "Flowers ... the autumn is drowning us in rotten flowers."

Regardless of the fecund setting and the seemingly interesting characters, the end result is a literary mirage that entices the reader with bursts of short, clever storytelling, seamless imagery, and nothing more than a gust of red sand as an aftertaste.

* Jonathan Cape, $45