Fiction: The tattered remnants of a defeated army is wandering through a desert landscape, its maps useless, its supplies on the point of exhaustion.
It is an old story, perhaps as old as mankind itself - but in this Greek Catch 22, Panos Karnezis has given it a strikingly fresh and mesmerisingly readable treatment. The Maze takes place in southern Turkey in 1922. Pursued by the victorious Turkish army, a Greek brigade is attempting to reach the Mediterranean coast, its perilous situation not helped by the fact that its brigadier is a morphine junkie and its major a Marxist who spends much of his time distributing anonymous handbills aimed at encouraging the troops to insurgency.
The scene is set for a Greek tragedy. Instead, as his motley crew holes up in a small town run by a mayor obsessed with his forthcoming marriage to a Parisian prostitute, Karnezis gives us a tragicomedy of delicious subtlety. Everything about this book is a joy. It has a wonderfully eccentric cast of characters, including an Orthodox priest who is hovering on the point of insanity and a war correspondent who is the epitome of pomposity.
The priest's mongrel dog, Caleb, is a character too - all he can do is bark, of course, but most of the others are barking mad anyhow. And then there is the Anatolian desert: a pitiless landscape whose raging storms conjure up the curse placed on humanity in the book of Genesis: "You are dust, and to dust you shall return . . . "
The entire narrative is constructed on the playful interaction of mythic past and inglorious present.
The brigadier's constant references to the pantheon of Greek gods are expanded upon in a series of explanatory footnotes; the text is littered with words which suggest another kind of invasion, this time a linguistic and cultural one - "encephalon", "anaesthetic", "paruresis", "anechoic". Pretty impressive for a writer working in an adopted language - but then, Karnezis is also a master of the memorable one-liner. "The two men stood under the sun like numbers in an equation which has no solution . . ."
The equation in question is as familiar as Pythagoras's theorem: the perennial confrontation between morality and expediency. Underlying it, of course, is another: the perennially difficult relationship between Greece and Turkey which caused the war in the first place. Karnezis's weapons as he manoeuvres deftly through this socio-political minefield are the ambiguous undertone and the gently humorous aside - based, needless to say, on razor-sharp observation of both sides.
If it sounds heavy, it isn't: his spellbinding lightness of touch sees to that. Last year, his début book of stories, Little Infamies, was hailed as miraculous: well, here's another miracle.
• Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
