The Oulipo movement, a group of mostly French writers in the second half of the 20th century, believed that imposing constraints on the writing process was a spur to creativity. Georges Perec famously wrote a novel without the letter “e”, while Jean Lescure’s N+7 approach produced new work by replacing every noun in an existing text with the noun seven places after it in the dictionary. It feels as if there will be a number of inadvertently Oulipean works that emerge from the chaos of the past few years, books that, were it not for Covid, might have been something very different.
Peter Fiennes’s sun-drenched hymn to Greece, A Thing of Beauty: Travels in Mythical and Modern Greece, feels like just this sort of book. A project that started out as a fairly straightforward travelogue has become something stranger and more interesting under the heightened pressure applied by the constraints of the pandemic. When Fiennes, a celebrated nature writer and former publisher at Time Out, begins his quest to get to the heart of Greece, international travel is impossible. He finds himself sitting by a lake at Byron’s home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, dreaming of Missolonghi, Apollo and nereids. Then, in the second chapter, when the travel ban (briefly) lifts and Fiennes is able to hightail it to Athens, his voyage is given added zest by the enforced delay, a sense of the miraculous imbuing everything.
Fiennes’s book has two central concerns. The first is to understand why Greece and Greek myths in particular have such an enduring hold on the contemporary psyche. Fiennes, though, wants to strip away the “closed-room fug of elitism” that surrounds the idea of “the classics” and instead seeks to establish a connection between the ancient past and the present through visiting the places from which these myths emerged. The second organising interest of the book is environmental. Partly this comes out of Fiennes’s background as a nature writer, but there’s something more than this. It seems he wants to establish whether there’s any way the wisdom of ancient Greece can be applied to the climate crisis: “If these people had possessed our technologies, was there any code, or anything about their beliefs, that would have restrained them from taking and using whatever they wanted?” This environmental concern, through the image of the hope that is left when Pandora’s box (actually, he tells us, a jar) is opened, expands into the idea that what we need most now is a means of harnessing the joy and optimism with which the Greeks addressed the world. Grecian light at a time of darkness.
Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide through Greece. He weaves the ancient world and the modern together with intelligence and elegance, taking us from Athens to Corinth, along the Sacred Way to Eleusis, to Epidavros, Olympia, Delphi and Epirus. There’s a wry Sebaldian humour at work here – he recognises that modern Greece doesn’t always live up to the majesty of the past. Stopping at the Temple of Dionysus in Thorikos, he stands beside a “deserted beige Portakabin” and recognises that “the God is long gone”. But these disappointments merely heighten the joy we feel when Fiennes lights upon connections to the past that spark and fizzle, when we discover that precious hope amid the ruins. A Thing of Beauty is a must-read for anyone visiting Greece but, at this time when travel is tricky for any number of reasons, perhaps even more essential for those of us who don’t know when next we’ll get there.
• A Thing of Beauty: Travels in Mythical and Modern Greece by Peter Fiennes is published by Oneworld (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
