Australia’s obsession with Greece goes back a long way; it has not always been as warm as we might like to think. The George Johnston–Charmian Clift–Sidney Nolan kind of love affair with the islands could sometimes turn a bit sour: think of Patrick White or demeaning references to the ubiquitous Olympic Café in films and stories. The temptation of writing in these well-established furrows is to exploit the subject matter rather than explore it.

There is male dancing, but no Zorba the Greek handkerchief-waving, in Arnold Zable’s new novel. In poignant fact, he reminds us of the earlier reception of Greeks in this country, during World War I, when our pleasant forbears – challenging etymology among other things and denying any connection with forbearance – rioted, smashed and looted Greek stalls and stores, and chased off those early refugees. Our cultural practices were entrenched from an early age. ‘Go back to where you fuck’n came from’: I’m not convinced that would have been the idiom in 1917. Where is the great sanguinary expletive? But you get the message. As against which the narrative invites us into a circle of listeners: ‘The fire is burning. And the fire loves you.’In Australia that reads as more threatening than welcoming.

Sea of Many Returns, only approximately a story, is rather an interweaving of stories which define the culture of Ithaca last century, and of those Ithacans who relocated to Melbourne, some of them via Kalgoorlie, and the tension of the unsevered links between them, links between brothers and families, intimate and extended. In this it develops the manner and mannerisms of Zable’s well-received Café Scheherazade (2001). Nostalgia is the underlying and crippling malaise of the Ithacans too, the pain of home-longing.