Mercury vs. Vulcan

The cruise ship passes a sheer black cliff on Palaa Kaimeni, a Greek islet off Santorini. Helga, an East German passenger, focuses her blue glance upon a blackened figure chained to it. There is a tremor; a rift appears and the figure drops from its severed manacles. A swarm of bees lifts and bears it away. It is the god Hermes, punished by Zeus thousands of years earlier for fornicating with Aphrodite and now set free.

It was high time that the world, stolidifying steadily, got Hermes back. Known to the Romans as Mercury (hence, from his nimbleness, the word “mercurial”), he was the god of messages and mischief, of thieves and idlers, of fairs, experiments and surprises.

German writer Sten Nadolny has brought the Greek gods into the present for a slangy allegory of revolt. His target is the concentration of economic and technological power in modern life, with the corresponding shrinkage in the autonomy and exuberance of the human spirit.

He has in mind the triumph of a worldwide bottom line, fine-tuned by information systems and enforced by the bond markets, over political and social values. He creates a fable to oppose the crushing of associative and intuitive ways of knowing by the computer’s digital juggernaut.

All this, more lightly--a German lightness that can turn ponderous--is illustrated by Hermes’ escapades as he bumbles and schemes an uprising against a rival, who has been running things for the last couple of millenniums. Hermes’ incandescence and irresponsibility go up against the methodically joyless calculation and industry embodied by Hephaestus, or Vulcan: the surly, lame blacksmith god who forged Zeus’ thunderbolts. In Nadolny’s tale, he is the father of modern technology and international finance.

Nadolny is the author of “The Discovery of Slowness,” published in English 10 years ago. It was a wise and melancholy rumination woven around the story of an early English polar explorer, but it was also a finely integrated novel whose ideas grew imperceptibly out of its characters. The ideas in “The God of Impertinence” are provocative and neatly worked out; but even for an allegory, its story and characters are bumpy cartoons. They are amusing, sometimes, but less amusing than contrived. Their smile is the smile of a pedagogue.

It is Helga’s gaze at the chained Hermes that releases him and gets everything going. She is a minor deity but, like most of the other gods since people stopped paying attention, she has vegetated and declined in a succession of human guises. Her real name is Helle; Nadolny, taking liberties with Greek mythology, makes her Hephaestus’ daughter.

Both as Helga and as Helle--the distinction soon disappears--she had always been in love with an effigy of Hermes, whose scalawag grace is the opposite of her father’s ponderous might. She joins her unchained sprite, who works off 2,000 years of immobility, jumping into the ears of a variety of humans to catch up with what is going on in the world.

What has mainly gone on is the rise of Hephaestus, whose ability to make and multiply alluring and powerful objects overshadows the other gods who once had despised him. Many work for him, though resentfully. Zeus, fretful and temperamental, realized that his magic interventions were no longer necessary because Hephaestus’ technology was quite as powerful. Accordingly, he retired to the United States to play golf.

*

Absolute power not only corrupts absolutely but depresses absolutely. Hephaestus is master of financiers, computer wizards, arms makers, subsidized terrorists and wire-tappers. He is a melancholy figure, though, with voracious appetites and no pleasure in eating. He has had Helle free Hermes because there is little satisfaction in chaining up the world’s mischief and freedom when these are moribund. Accordingly, he offers his rival a job as a kind of house rebel.

Hermes who, in the way of instant celebrity, is becoming a media star, refuses. He is useless in a world defined by the accumulation of power, wealth and consumer goods.

“It doesn’t take an oracle to know that multiplication is not for me. If I multiply myself I cease to exist. My name is widespread--and turns common. I was more of a god chained on Palaa Kaimeni than I am now. So my good brother, I hereby withdraw from radio and TV and return to magic. If I’m involved with mortals it will be one at a time. I’ll be on foot from now on, a god of simple addition, unmathematical like life itself.”

From here on, it is war. Hiding from Hephaestus’ spies and wire taps, Hermes and Hella undertake various extravagant schemes. Finally they challenge him to play poker for the future of the world. It is a game in which, like anything to do with mastery and accumulation, the blacksmith god is unbeatable.

The other gods show up after Hermes places an ad in that Parnassian publication, Le Monde. Hephaestus wins the poker game--system beats improvisation every time, he gloats--but loses the larger match. Hermes’ resurrection has lifted his fellow divinities out of their funks. They get Hephaestus to take up gardening. Zeus returns and the world is delivered back to its unpredictable human--and godlike--possibilities.

Just in time, too. Hephaestus’ power was turning him from depressive to suicidal. The gods are unable to die, though, as long as there are humans to imagine them. The only solution was to arrange for nuclear holocaust plus selected volcanic eruptions.

Nadolny’s allegory is forced, to say the least. When the end is reached, he has given up the few narrative pains he took. The story becomes as tenuous as the bits of stage business that get us into a Platonic dialogue.

The reader makes do with the ideas, and these have a certain bounce, particularly in their use of the Greek gods. Their dependence on humans has long literary roots, but Nadolny employs them wittily as markers of our contemporary condition. They are tempted by Hephaestus’ technological and economic prowess, and then they wilt under it. So, the author suggests, do e. Revolt against grim logic--economics used to be called the dismal science--restores them and presumably will restore us, too.