Ancient wisdom

THE ATHENIAN MURDERS By José Carlos Somoza, Abacus, £ 6.99

Is there a reader in the text? This could be the query really discussed in this thriller. The question is an altered version of another posed by a famous postmodern literary critic: “Is there a text in the class?” This, in fact, is two narratives in one. One, the main text, is the story of a series of gruesome murders in Athens in the fifth century BC, and the way the mystery is solved by Heracles Pontor, known in the Greek capital as the “Decipherer of Enigmas”. The second narrative runs as extensive footnotes to the main text and involves the present translator and the original one. The Athenian Murders is a Greek text discovered and translated by Montalo.The latter’s edition was a scholarly work with annotations and comments on the nature and condition of the papyrus on which the original text was written.

The story is a simple, if horrifying, one. They involve the serial killing of three young men — all students of Plato’s Academy. (The great philosopher, in fact, makes a cameo appearance in the novel.) All of them had their bodies ripped apart with their entrails out. Heracles Pontor had an interest in the case because he knew the family of the first victim and had been in love with the victim’s mother in his youth.

But his initial interest is galvanized by Diagoras, a member of the Academy who immediately after the first death apprehends some kind of foul play. Heracles is a deep believer in reason and the powers of reasoning. His investigations take him into the nether world of classical Athens, a world of secret cults that practice bizarre rituals and worship Dionysius. Members of this cult, contrary to Plato’s quest for harmony and virtue, believed in the spontaneous and ecstatic will to life. Heracles’s own life and that of Diagoras (playing Watson or more appropriately, Captain Hastings) are threatened and they are both tortured. But the truth is unraveled and it is a strange and disturbing one.

But equally strange is the plight of our translator who reads the Greek text as an eidetic text. He explains the term thus: “Eidesis is a literary technique invented by the ancient Greeks to transmit secret messages or keys in their works. It consists in repeating, in any text, metaphors or words that, when identified by a perceptive reader, make up an idea or image that’s independent of the original text.” He is convinced that The Athenian Murders has a secret message, which Montalo had completely missed. His complete involvement with the text and its assumed secret leads the translator to see himself in the text and to discern parallels with his own life and that of Montalo who returns to the story to give it a twist in the tale.

The book is full of allusions, as indeed a book posing as a translation of an eidetic text should be. Heracles Pontor is a thinly-veiled reference to Hercule Poirot. The story refers directly to the twelve tasks of Hercules, which as lovers of Agatha Christie will recall, is the title of one of the great Poirot stories. This thriller is stunningly inventive and full of inside jokes, which are at times elusive. The writer, one imagines, is cocking a snook at the postmodernists, who take liberties with the meanings of texts under the slogan, the author is dead. This cannot be read as an ordinary whodunit. It is a demanding read but totally rewarding. Umberto Eco once suggested that the only kind of murder mystery yet to be written is the one where the reader is the murderer. This comes close to that impossibility. The Athenian Murders, together with Eco’s great first novel, Name of the Rose, and the more recent My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, show that the intellectual murder mystery is a valuable addition to the genre pioneered by Poe and Conan Doyle.