Kate’s adventure to Greece in 1974 ended up being much more than she expected!

At the beginning of the story, Kate is a unique combination of independent and naive. She’s lived in a few different states since completing her formal education in speech therapy and getting married ... and divorced. Now she’s ready to really branch out and move half-way around the world for a job in Greece that she saw in a journal. She didn’t speak any Greek when she applied, but the kind woman who hired her assured her that she could pick up enough as she went along in her job helping children.

Shortly before she packs her things and gets ready to move to Greece for the year, she finds out the political climate isn’t very hospitable to Americans. It gives her a few second thoughts, but she really doesn’t understand how someone could hate a whole population the way they’re trying to make it sound. The woman from the center who hired her assures her that they’ll be her Greek family and keep her safe. The situation is reasonably comfortable, until Kate starts making some choices and adventures on her own.

While the story takes place almost 50 years ago, it felt contemporary and the descriptions of Greece were beautiful. The commentary about the people, customs, and culture were also interesting. This was an enjoyable book that earned 3 out of 5 stars. It would be recommended to those who enjoy historical fiction, especially in a memoir style.

I found this story somewhat interesting, a woman making a huge change in her life by finding a new job in Greece… I wasn’t really sure of the historical time frame at first, but found all the political content somewhat dull…though the personal conflicts Kate was experiencing were interesting. I kind of skimmed the political parts.

In what remains for me the most unputdownable novel I've ever read, John Fowles’ “The Magus” (fifty years now it's been since I first dipped into its mesmerizing pages), a young Englishman disaffected with his native country and tired of a romantic involvement takes his leave of both and accepts a teaching post in Greece. A "new land and a new mystery" is how he puts it about what he’s looking for, a sentiment not unlike the “giddy anticipation” of “an exciting overseas adventure” felt by Kate Adams, the likable protagonist of Kathryn Crawley's "Walking on Fire," as she too accepts a job offer in Greece over the objections of her parents and despite newspaper pictures she sees of fierce Greek anti-American sentiment, it being not being too long after the collapse of the Greek dictatorship in 1974.
Close enough it is to the time of the junta, though, that emotions are still running high among a group of characters Kate encounters who are looking to exact retribution from former officials of the regime, including, Kate supposes, her interrogator upon her arrival on Greek soil, Captain Hercules Markakis. Almost comical she finds his name, “like a Saturday morning cartoon character,” though there’s nothing funny to her about her situation as she stands anxiously before him, nervously taking in pictures of military men on his wall and recalling stories she’s heard of prison and torture under the old regime and wondering what role he might have played. What will happen to her, she wonders, if her papers don't pass muster with him.
Fortunately, though, things go well enough with him that he even shows a “flash of kindness” as he welcomes her to his country and heralds the help she will bring as a speech therapist to the nation's "poor handicapped children.” He even jokes to her that now he knows whom to call if his children need an American babysitter.
Still, glad she is to be done with him, even if there remains the matter of having to get to the therapy center on her own, since she wasn’t met by a center official as promised – not the most auspicious beginning to her new situation.
Once she’s installed in her new circumstances, though, her apprehension is quelled by the graciousness of her host family, and, even more so, by a romantic involvement that will soothe somewhat the hurt of a failed marriage back home which was in part what sent her to Greece.
However, for all her new lover's appeal, he also makes for some unsettledness by his association with an especially retribution-minded group whose ranks include a nasty piece of work named Stelios, who is determined enough about getting vengeance that he ends up posing an even greater threat for Kate than the captain, who will in the end prove to be not such a bad sort after all. Indeed, the concern that he later voices for her contrasted with the out-and-out menace manifested toward her by Stelios make up two parts of a threefold lesson the novel serves up for Kate. At the individual level, she will come to appreciate that seemingly good people can do bad things and seemingly bad people can have good motives, while on the national level, she will come to understand that seemingly good countries can do bad things, with the U.S. being the prime instance. With its support for the junta, of course, but also for its involvement in Vietnam, which is the occasion for Greek anger throughout the novel.
Much on display that anger is, for instance, when she is taken by her new acquaintances to a film which turns out to be an angry documentary about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Opening with a quote from 1776 about the ideals of American independence, the film follows with photos of Civil War statues and American soldiers tramping through the jungles of Vietnam as well as a larger-than-life image of LBJ, which draws raucous catcalls from the audience. So intense, indeed, is the audience reaction to what’s on the screen that it actually pushes her back in her seat as hisses grow "like a garden of snakes" to images of Nixon and in particular Kissinger, for whom there seems to be a special venom and who draws chants of “Murderer Kissinger” at a demonstration she’s also taken to where she thinks she sees the captain observing the protesters and wonders what repercussions that might make for her.
Reminiscent it was for me, the intensity of the anti-Vietnam sentiments coupled with the paranoia about possible consequences of dissent, of my time in uniform during those tumultuous times, when I was hard-pressed to feel much patriotic fervor for a nation that was supporting a regime whose odiousness was perhaps most vividly evidenced for me by the supposed remark of the regime’s Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu, that she'd supply a match to the Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest – or words to that effect, anyway.
However the sentiment was expressed, it captured the character of a regime so objectionable that a cable at the time showed some U.S. officials ready to encourage a coup. There was even later speculation that the U.S. might have been complicit in the assassination of the regime's leaders, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, which decidedly brought an end to that phase of Vietnam governance but hardly an end to an extended U.S. presence which ended up going on for 12 more years and killing 58,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese and later drawing an apology from a regretful McNamara. "We were wrong, terribly wrong," he said of a debacle which to my mind wasn’t simply an isolated terrible mistake, as McNamara might have had it, but rather part of an overall pattern of ill-advised U.S. interventions abroad propping up authoritarian regimes, with perhaps the most shameful instance being in Chile, where the U.S. role so horrified Rose Styron, widow of the novelist William Styron, that she cited it in her just-out memoir “Beyond This Harbor" as having galvanized her own activism and, like those Greek students, gotten her to particularly despise Kissinger.
Which is getting somewhat afield of Crawley’s novel, to be sure, though the breadth of the American bent for authoritarianism is instanced in Crawley's novel not just internationally by the U.S roles in Vietnam and Greece but also domestically by the novel’s citing of a prominent American movie of the time, “Seven Days in May,” in which U.S. Army officers led by a charismatic Burt Lancaster attempt to take control of the U.S. government. Downright prescient the movie was of events today, particularly with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and its support by a real-life retired general with the same sentiments as the Lancaster character, even if the real-life general doesn't have half the charisma as the Lancaster character and the coup attempt depicted in the movie seemed wildly implausible at the time.
Enough of an impression the film makes on Kate, though, that she's put in mind of it as she studies those photos on Markakis’ wall. Perhaps the movie plot was not too far from what happened in Greece? she wonders, making an equation of sorts between the actual events that installed the junta in Greece and the possibility of such an action in the U.S.
Still, a bit of a stretch, I’ll acknowledge, trying to make parallels between Crawley's novel and events today and even perhaps hijacking her novel a bit for my own purposes, though Fowles did say of "The Magus," which as I said I was much put in mind of by Crawley's novel and which is apropos here with its depiction of Greek resistance during WWII, that he regarded any sort of reader reaction to it as legitimate. So I'll take that as sufficient warrant to unapologetically offer up my notions, however forced, about a novel which, in keeping with my thoughts about it or not, is nevertheless a compelling story of an engaging young American woman caught up in unsettling events abroad.