Beware Englishmen insulting Greeks

A GOOD thing, perhaps, that the Greek ship-owner and businessman John D Criticos is no longer with us. The prize which bears his name was founded to celebrate and reward an English-language work promoting Anglo-Greek understanding. That's something pretty thin on the ground right now.

The British, we're told, always take the side of the underdog. But who tells us that? I suspect we tell ourselves. It's bullshit, isn't it? We despise the underdog, and contempt, like charity, begins at home.

Currently, it's the Greeks.

While the global press, mindful of its need to suck up to the money, has been nagging, whining and denouncing the Greeks, their British brethren, spotting an underdog, have been putting the boot in day after day. It's an unconscious British principle, bred in the bone and in Fleet Street: the best time to kick a man is when he's down.

Like all bullying, it's hypocritical. Greece is in trouble, yes. But we're in trouble too - look at the recent bunch of letters sent to the terminally ill telling them they can forget about their effing money, awri'? - and so are the Spanish, the Italians, the Irish and the Portuguese, and we're not insulting them day after day.

Somehow, it's as if we want to see Greece sink hopelessly into the Aegean. We love the idea of them being bossed around by the Germans without a moment's thought to the deliberate atrocities committed by Germany in WW2 - atrocities pre-ordained, the German approach being, simply, "treat them like the animals they are" - even though there are still plenty of Greeks around to remember them. Nor did we behave much better.

And yet, with a repulsive and unearned moral superiority, we insult the Greeks day after day.

Anyone who's been in Greece recently knows what it's like. The once-middle-class women looking for work as charladies. The families whose incomes have been cut by 60 per cent at a stroke. The tourist businesses out on the islands who work 24 days in the season. The raiding tax-men, the silly new offences and imposts, born of desperation like a man selling off his shoes to pay back the bank. The opportunistic influx of Russian mafiosi.

Sympathy? Eff off. As long as the Greeks exist, the rest of us - and it was London-based financial institutions who must take a weighty share of the blame for the whole bloody mess - are out of the spotlight.

This year's Criticos Prize will be awarded in early November to Zachary Mason, an American mathematician, for his marvellously playful, intricate, intelligent and entertainingly postmodern (two words you'll not often see together) re-working of Homer, Lost Books of the Odyssey.  

In it, with narrative flair and superbly insouciant geek-chic, Mason dismantles, reassembles, inverts and reinvents the tale of Odysseus's literally rhapsodic and epic journey home to Ithaka after the Trojan Wars.

Sometimes Mason sees it from the underdog's point of view (the Cyclops as a decent chap who takes pity on some trespassers and invites them in). Sometimes he explores alternatives: Penelope, archetype of the faithful wife, is a mere ghost in one story; in another, Odysseus marries her sister Helen.

In one version Homer himself puts in an appearance, as a wholly-believable idle would-be author dreaming of literary fame without effort.

It's all tremendous fun – not just for fans of Homer's originals, but for anyone who enjoys elegant, imaginative and sometimes challenging storytelling. And it reunites, as did David Malouf's Ransom (itself a previous Criticos Prize winner), our contemporary life with the great stories of the ancient world.

And maybe that's why, right now, we seem to hate Greece so much: it's squandered what we believe to be our cultural heritage. How can the land that gave us Homer and Aeschylus, Plato and Sophocles and Aristotle and Pythagoras and all the rest of those extraordinary people who invented thinking have fallen into such disarray?

It's not even as if it's now irrelevant. Our democracies now look back to 5th century BC Athens for their legitimacy. Most of Hollywood's blockbusters and the vast computer-game industry still use the model of the ‘hero's journey', thought up by Homer in the Odyssey. We are, we like to kid ourselves, just a more sophisticated sort of Greek.

But we're not. And nor are they. The city-state of Athens is long gone, and, with it, its people. Modern Greece was hacked out in forced and voluntary migrations, in international and civil war, and in coups, juntas and an imported monarchy. Eighty per cent of Greece is harsh, barren mountains.

Seventy per cent of modern Greeks aren't the children of the gods, but of Romai descent. They, like Odysseus, are struggling with nostos, the "return to the light".  

Meanwhile, the sneering, bullying British press and the self-satisfied bankers of northern Europe - as if they are somehow ethically better - are bullying the modern Greeks into catastrophe, as a sort of nasty lard spread on their own moral bankruptcy.

Never mind the media; it's a tale which needs a Homer to do it justice. But there's never one around when you need one.

• Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason, Vintage. ISBN 978-0099547075 ·