History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10 · Translated from Greek (original title Kapetan Michalis)

• Accuracy: The Cretan uprising of 1889 against Ottoman rule is faithful in outline, filtered through Kazantzakis’s memories of his father and of Heraklion.
• Readability: Vigorous and operatic, with a huge cast and passionate, sometimes overblown prose.
• Plot: A fierce Cretan captain’s pride and a forbidden passion collide with rebellion in Megalo Kastro.

Captain Michalis is a man of few words and savage temper, a Cretan who hates the Turks, despises weakness and guards his honour like a blade. In Megalo Kastro, the old name for Heraklion, tension is rising between Christian and Muslim communities under Ottoman rule. When his blood-brother Nuri Bey, a Turk, is drawn into a quarrel over Eminé, a Circassian beauty, the personal and the political ignite together.

Kazantzakis modelled Michalis on his own father, and the book draws on childhood memories of revolt and massacre. It has the force of family legend: larger than life, full of vows, feasts and bloodshed. The town is built from a crowded cast of merchants, priests, teachers and eccentrics, many of them comic, all shaped by the island’s history.

The novel is rich in scenes: drinking bouts, funerals, battles in the mountains, sudden violence in the streets. The prose is exuberant and at times grandiose, with a constant sense that these people carry the weight of Crete’s long struggle for freedom.

It is also uncomfortable. Its nationalism is fierce, and its view of Muslims, though not uniformly hostile, is shaped by it. Women are largely objects of desire or honour. The hero’s code can look as destructive as the oppression it resists.

The 8 reflects a powerful, sometimes overwhelming novel that is hard to forget. It is less famous in English than Zorba the Greek or The Last Temptation of Christ, but many readers consider it Kazantzakis’s most rooted and personal book.