Codename Xenophon - Leo Kanaris

On Greek Independence Day, 2010, the controversial academic John Petrakis is murdered in his shower. Descended from a powerful family, Petrakis has scandalised conservative Greeks by challenging the myths of Greece as the cradle of civilisation. His work dealt with ‘the less palatable aspects of ancient Greek life’ – subjects such as slavery, paedophilia and child sacrifice. Despairing of the ‘pathetic’ police, Petrakis’s brother Constantine hires George Zafiris, a middle-aged private investigator, to identify the assassin. Just as Petrakis’s research unearthed a gap between the perception of ancient Greece and the uncomfortable reality, Zafiris finds that his work uncovers a hidden side of Greek society in which oligarchs subvert democratic functions, and the working people of the country pay for the mistakes of the business elite.

To outsiders, Greece has plenty of attractions: 'the lure of antiquity. Or nature. The pagan gods. The Orthodox Church. The sea... but the biggest and best is the Byronic impulse to escape failure at home and live in a sunlit land posing as a genius'. The daily reality for the inhabitants is quite different. Kanaris depicts a ‘superannuated’ country, where 'businesses were going bust, salaries and pensions shrinking with horrible speed. People were getting ill, going mad, wanting to disappear from their own lives'. The bureaucracy is over-worked and plagued with corruption, forcing citizens to use unofficial channels where they can. The sea has become a marine car-park, symbolic of the general malaise, filled with 'laid-up tankers and cargo ships. Images of a stalled economy going nowhere'.  In amongst the chaos, however, are oases in which 'luxury - of the strange, 1960s, cigarette-advertisement kind’ flourishes.

Zafiris finds himself investigating a mysterious vigilante group, organised by a retired Colonel who is suffering from dementia. He is convinced that deciphering the coded membership list will lead him to Petrakis’s killer, but is frustrated by the authorities’ refusal to collaborate with him. Gradually, he finds himself drawn into a milieu of cheating politicians, corrupt officials and business leaders with links to organised crime.

As in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, Kanaris examines the way in which powerful men look to exploit fragile states to advance their own aims, using the chaos which accompanied the economic collapse to undermine dissent and neuter the power of public services. As Zafiris uncovers more and more evidence of corruption, he comes to realise that the modern concepts of ‘civic ideals...fairness, transparency, equality of opportunity' are as much of a myth as the whitewashed picture of ancient Greece which John Petrakis had exposed. This is a world in which austerity forces the poor to pay for the mistakes of the rich, and in which justice is a commodity to be bought by the highest bidder.

Stylistically, Codename Xenophon is a traditional noir, and there are a few stock scenes employed as the story develops, for example the investigator’s office being broken into by unnamed gangsters. The satire and political commentary ensures that the novel feels fresh though, and unfortunately it looks like Zafiris’s critique of the Greek state will continue to feel relevant for some time to come. This is a short, punchy and enjoyable novel, let down slightly by its conclusion, in which the killer is unmasked; it feels as though the author has become less interested in the plot than in the point he is making. Having said that, I would still recommend Codename Xenophon: we need authors to address austerity and the Eurozone crisis, and Zafiris achieves this in an engaging and lively manner.