Cyprus, The Troubles and lives changed by conflict

Stephen Myles’ novel follows two families through the upheavals of Cyprus and Northern Ireland, bringing the human cost of conflict sharply into focusFor a journalist of Irish heritage living in Cyprus for decades, it might seem natural that reading a novel whose backdrop is both The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the upheavals in Cyprus in 1955 and 1974 would be all-too familiar territory historically speaking. The answer to whether that is so, would be yes and no. Being a journalist, yes, there was a degree of familiarity when reading Trench by Stephen Myles. However, it’s also such an engrossing saga about ordinary people, I demolished it in one day. Myles, coincidentally also a journalist of Irish heritage who’s lived in Cyprus on and off for decades, brings much more to the table than accurate depictions of well-known historical Cypriot figures and locations. He witnessed first-hand the aftermath of the Turkish invasion in the 1970s and being from Northern Ireland, could not but experience The Troubles. That matters. By contrast, this reader was a teenager living on the rural south coast of the Republic of Ireland in the 1970s with access to a one-channel colourless TV and no interest in politics. Northern Ireland and The Troubles might as well have been as far away as Cyprus. Despite accumulating a working knowledge over the years about both conflicts, I have not lived through anything like what the people of Northern Ireland did nor what the Greek Cypriots of 1955 and 1974 actually experienced. However, Trench, with its rich atmosphere gave me permission to imagine that I really was present, that I was observing from a high vantage point like people are said to experience during hospital NDEs. Through Myles’ flawless narrative, it felt like I was not just reading about but witnessing every conversation had by these fictional but very ordinary people whose lives were shattered by conflict both in Ireland and in Cyprus. I’ve never been to Donegal but it definitely felt like I had, and yes it felt cold, wet, windy, wild and remote. EOKA A family caught in the Eoka struggle After the prologue, Myles gets straight into introducing a Greek Cypriot family from Dherinia. It’s during the beginning of the Eoka struggle, circa 1955, and the weather’s warm. I was on more familiar ground and hooked. Eleni has been raised in the UK but married off to Christos Papadakis in Cyprus. They have two sons and of course there’s a larger-than-life yiayia. I knew right away there was going to be more to Eleni than the dutiful daughter-in-law and obedient wife who has to bite her tongue more often than she cares to. She was also invariably singled out during inspections in the village by British soldiers due to her UK upbringing, which had served to plant the seeds of suspicion among the villagers for a time at least. Unlike Eleni, it was difficult to formulate an immediate impression as to the kind of man Christos was as a husband, father and son, only that he did not think twice about doing his duty and joining Eoka. Despite his short appearance in the book, Christos’ fate was the catalyst for all of the events that followed by virtue of his interrogation by a Major Frederick Trench when he was taken prisoner by the British and later hanged after being wounded in an Eoka operation. “But first we must fix those horrible wounds of yours… never do to make a sick man swing,” Trench tells him. Cold, Trench, cold. But it was Trench’s subsequent insertion of himself into Eleni’s life and that of her eldest son that truly put into motion the wheel of destiny. Myles paints Trench as a “shadowy military spymaster” whose decisions “forge a future of love, betrayal and shocking violence that he neither foresaw nor intended”. One wonders what would have happened if he’d not had an attack of conscience and had stayed out of their lives when Eleni moved back to London for a time. The Troubles in Northern Ireland From Cyprus to Northern Ireland Years after Christos’ death and Cyprus’ independence, thousands of miles away The Troubles in Northern Ireland are experienced through the lens of an Irish family, the Macormacks and a young relative’s connection to the IRA. Done with Cyprus, Major Trench is not a thousand miles away from that conflict either. But there is a clear difference in his approach to Eleni and her sons and to Cyprus in general: regrets, a fondness for the island and even sympathy for the struggle for independence. His interactions in Northern Ireland come across as those of a British officer doing his job in the same way it had been his job to interrogate Christos Papadakis and see him hanged. Where this tale excels is in the way in which Myles weaves and intertwines the stories and links the fates of members of two families on opposite ends of Europe at a time when the expression “global village” had not yet been invented. In Trench, there are times when you expect things could head in one direction – the way you might want things to go after investing in the characters – but they suddenly and unapologetically do not comply with your wishes. Myles keeps you in the dark until you give up trying to predict what will happen. Myles has also given a life, a soul and a voice to those whose photos we in media sometimes become desensitised to. We’re used to seeing newspaper images on the ‘Black Anniversaries’ year after year in Cyprus, women mostly, holding up photos of their missing and dead with perhaps a sympathetic but matter-of-fact article underneath. But sympathy is not the same as empathy. If a book can make someone pause to ponder that, then it’s done its job. Everything in Trench is high-stakes – war, guerrilla warfare, politics and death but also love and family. It’s a novel, yes, but Trench is fully grounded in what were devastating realities for so many Irish and Cypriot families – thousands of people with names as ordinary as Eleni and Christos, Dermot, Brendan and Mary. Trench is available on Kindle from amazon.com or in paperback from amazon.co.uk Stephen Myles is a journalist who has worked in Ireland, Cyprus and Thailand, including as Editor-in-Chief of the Cyprus Mail between 1994 and 2004 following a previous stint at the newspaper in the late seventies. Myles started out in newspapers, progressed to television news at the height of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, and later joined the international news agency Agence France-Presse. He was with AFP for two decades, focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. Much of his work, both writing and editing, focused on conflict.