Boyish Heroics

STRATIS HAVIARAS brings to The Heroic Age the lyrical style, eye for the visual, and economic approach of a poet rather than a novelist. This should not be surprising. Haviaras has written both Greek and English poetry, and is the curator of the Woodberry poetry collection here at Harvard. His second novel. The Heroic Age, recounts the turbulent adolescence of a boy, Panagis, growing up in factious, post-World War II Greece.

Haviaras's lyrical gifts are very much in evidence throughout the novel. As Panagis and a group of other boys set out across the Greek countryside at the beginning of the novel (being homeless and wishing to leave Greece). Panagis tells the reader what he is seeing:

From the top of the dike the plain looked endless, colorless, with a few bare trees, a row of crooked telegraph poles, and half a dozen or so huts marking the view of the terrain but failing to interrupt its flatness and lack of color. The sound of a shepherd's reed in the distance made his small flock of sheep and goats visible. The goats separated themselves from the sheep seemingly by following the sound of their own bells. But there wasn't even a small patch of green, and what the animals fed on couldn't be anything other than last summer's weeds, now dead and discolored by water.

The Greek landscape is not always so peaceable. Later in the novel, when the boys approach water, they are set upon by a cloud of stinging insects. Panagis reports: the main body of the swarm moved to block our way, and the air became so thick that the last rays of the sun could not penetrate it. It was as though the air had taken a visible body and was eager to show its pulse and its muscle, its twisting limbs at each point of severance, and its furious powers of regeneration....as its body blocked our view, so did its collective voice obliterate all other sounds and noises, even our forceful steps on the stoaes even our own voices.

When Haviaras's imagination latches on to a situation, his prose assumes a visual and descriptive brilliance not unlike that of Hardy or Cather.

HAVIARAS'S powers broaden when he shifts from describing the countryside to describing humanity. As Panagis and the others move away from the insect swarm, they find a man lying unconscious and nearly dead by the water. When they look inside the baskets of the man's mule, they see "the severed heads of four or five young men and women. The mule's owner was a headhunter, receiving pay for the heads of leftist sympathizers: Haviaras lingers on such scenes, making us feel, in the thoroughness of his description, the impact they have on Greek children.

Faces of the martyrs, each leaning against the other as in old ikons, sorrow slanting their eyes as centuries before. And yet one could tell that a few hours earlier, before the dark set in their eyes, there was compassion in their eyes; before the dark filled their mouths there was hope in every word they uttered. They were young, and they would remain young as the gods had intended.

As if to emphasize how overwhelming such impressions are, Haviaras does not endow his characters with very intense feelings. Panagis's chief interest as a narrator lies in recording the impact of, what he sees on the people around him. Finding himself incapable of fervor, he does not display much enthusiasm for the leftist cause he joins Panagis, discouraged from leaving Greece by the knowledge that things are no better outside, turns, back from the border to join the leftist Andartes. After surviving some incredible fighting. Panagis is put into a concentration camp, release from which enables him to return to love as the novel draw to a close.

Haviaras's decision to make Panagis the story's first person narrator for the story puts Haviaras squarely in the tradition of those writers, of whatever country, who choose to write from a child's perspective to achieve greater distance from their society. His use of this voice is fairly skillful. Panagis reports what he has seen with the freshness and force of real experience.

The reader experiences short gusts of incredulity only when the children of the novel discuss Greek politics with an alertness and a willing acceptance of facts not found in most adults. One can't know whether Greek children of this time were much different from American children now, but their too-dispassionate conversation seems, at points, either contrived or more than human. True, this talk is in keeping with the measured, slightly cool tone of much of the narrative even Panagis's approach to love at the end of the novel is treated in an artistically businesslike fashion.

AQUESTION OVER who constitutes the proper audience for The Heroic Age produces one's chief qualm with the novel. No doubt Greeks will be better able to appreciate Haviaras's writing the novel in English Haviaras also commits himself to pleasing an American audience. While he is careful to give the reader the brute information necessary to understand the names of the political groups, be is slightly lay in establishing the meaning of this information. A certain animating philosophical passion would make this book more accessible to American readers, transmuting the craftsmanlike and episodic plot into a story more obviously symbolic of general human experience.