The Anatomy of Arcadia

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

Solway spent a year with his wife and two children on the Greek island
of Paxos, in the Ionian Sea just south of Corfu. In this memoir of their
stay, he seeks to debunk the myth of Arcadia: his premise is that no
such idyllic place exists.

The author’s year-long ordeal on Paxos certainly lends credence to
this hypothesis. The family has a horrendous winter on the island. Their
rented house leaks and its antiquated heating system does not function
in the freezing cold weather. Solway comes to dislike the Paxiots, whom
he describes as venal, rapacious, and lazy—the antithesis of the
generous, open-hearted, Homeric figures described by other travel
writers.

After 17 years of visiting Greece, Solway’s somewhat carping
love-affair with that country is apparently over. He spends a month of
his sabbatical in Italy and decides that from now on his home away from
Canada will be Italy. Perhaps Italy will prove to be Arcadia, although
he is sure that something will disillusion him there as well.

A subtheme is Solway’s analysis of travel writing. In seeking to
define what constitutes a legitimate travel book, he discusses (and
disparages) the works of noted authorities on Greece (Lawrence Durrell,
Henry Miller, and P.L. Fermor), accusing them of not being honest
enough, of presenting the reader with heightened versions of reality.
True or not, those authors make for more enjoyable and inspiring reading
than does this litany of complaints.

Although there is some evocative writing and some humor in this book,
Solway’s complaining tone detracts from its readability, as do the
numerous typos.