The power of beauty and ugliness

The power of beauty and ugliness is a recurring force in the novel: Greece is first imagined through beautiful images, then encountered as a place where splendour, damage, welcome, and hostility coexist. Beauty can draw people toward a landscape or a person with startling force, while ugliness can halt that attraction and make destruction impossible to ignore. Neither is merely decorative. Each changes how Ellie Thomas and the travelling narrator understand where they are, what they want, and what they had taken for granted.

Images and Expectations

For Ellie, beauty first arrives on a corkboard. The postcards signed only A gather into a mosaic of blue and white: skies, sea, boats, whitewashed buildings, blue shutters, and, on some cards, the Greek flag. Their colours stand out against the closed-in life of her flat in Kensal Rise, where winter’s darkness seems to persist even after spring begins. As the cards accumulate, the names of places such as Kalamata, Kalavrita, and Kosmas acquire a musical allure. The images and names make a country she has never visited part of her daily imagination.

The postcards do not pretend to provide the whole experience: their writer stresses that pictures cannot convey Greece’s scents or sounds. For Ellie, however, the brief visual glimpse is enough to make the country feel emotionally present. Her job selling advertising space leaves her bored, and the future she expected when she moved from Cardiff to London has not come into focus. The postcards offer a counter-image to that routine and intensify her wish to go somewhere else. When none arrive for more than a month, their absence makes the images feel less like decoration and more like an invitation she must answer. She studies the postcards’ curling edges, wonders whether their skies are real or exaggerated, and books a trip to Nafplio. The journey is spontaneous in its immediate decision, but the wish has been forming card by card.

Beauty as Encounter

The travelling narrator describes beauty not as a settled judgment but as an encounter that can take him by surprise. In Arcadia, a shepherd and his flock lend the landscape a mythic association with Pan, while the green mountains, waterfalls, flowering trees, and slate-roofed cottage seem to fulfil the region’s idealized reputation. The scene briefly makes the boundary between ordinary travel and myth feel uncertain. Yet an image of shepherds gathered around a tomb in a painting by Poussin, seen at the Louvre, supplies a counterthought: even an imagined paradise cannot exclude death. The narrator’s unease in this beautiful place also leads him to recognize that his own former happiness had been an illusion.

Beauty’s force is also personal. The narrator reflects that an old man’s unreturned attraction to Pelagia illustrates how easily physical beauty can command attention. He connects that force to his own first notice of his former partner, whose appearance had affected him before he knew her well. Such attraction is presented as involuntary and powerful, but not as a reliable measure of character or intimacy. Beauty can begin an attachment without ensuring reciprocity or lasting happiness.

In Patras, the new Basilica of Saint Andrew offers a different kind of aesthetic experience. The narrator visits repeatedly, sometimes simply to sit among its elaborate decoration and light. Maria Leontidis is often there, noisily vacuuming; the ordinary work does not erase the church’s capacity to give the narrator moments of joy. The beauty of the place matters as an experience in itself, even as he continues to think about his heartbreak. The juxtaposition suggests that beauty may provide relief without resolving grief.

Ugliness and the Damaged Landscape

The narrator’s account refuses to make Greece a continuous postcard. He describes ancient Greek sculpture and architecture as evidence that beauty mattered deeply in the past, including Cycladic objects around five thousand years old that seem shaped by aesthetic as well as practical concerns. Against that inheritance, unfinished concrete buildings and abandoned hotels, factories, and offices appear jarring. Their clashing styles and materials make the built environment feel disordered rather than harmonious.

The abandoned dam across the Achelous becomes the most consequential instance of this contrast. Its rusting mechanism, vast concrete structure, and graffiti mark a place where public money has been squandered and someone has profited. The narrator imagines future visitors struggling to reconcile the dam with the Acropolis, as though both belonged to histories that could not be made coherent. He has difficulty simply passing by, but eventually drives on, trying to put distance between himself and the damaged landscape before nightfall. Ugliness here is not just a matter of taste: it directs attention to waste, abandonment, and the lasting alteration of a place.

The Limits of the Postcard

The difference between appearance and experience also shapes the narrator’s encounters with villages. One fishing village seems almost impossibly picturesque, with a sheltered harbour, colourful boats, a sandy cove, and old olive trees on the hillsides. Yet its residents show little interest in visitors: diners are locals, a traveller asking for a table is met with dismissive responses, and there are no shops selling ordinary beach supplies or accommodation for tourists. The narrator calls the place deficient in hospitality. Its beauty does not make it welcoming, and looking like a destination does not mean that it wants to receive one.

The contrast becomes clear when the narrator reaches a modest workaday town later that night. A two-star hotel costs twenty-five euros; the owner offers another espresso and asks about his journey. After an unfriendly evening in the beautiful village, this simple welcome leads the narrator to stay another night. His sense of being alone has also become less painful than it once was. The sequence revises the tourist’s usual hierarchy: an impressive view cannot guarantee an easy human encounter, while an unremarkable setting can become memorable through kindness.

Beauty, Memory, and Change

The novel gives both Ellie and the narrator reasons to question idealized pictures. Ellie’s postcards inspire a real journey, but they remain snapshots, not promises that the whole country will match their colours. For the narrator, Arcadia’s pastoral beauty coexists with an awareness of mortality, and Greece’s celebrated aesthetic heritage sits beside damaged landscapes and unfinished buildings. These contrasts do not cancel beauty; they make it harder to treat beauty as proof that a place, a relationship, or a life is perfect.

Beauty can still offer genuine pleasure: the narrator finds joy in the basilica, and Ellie’s accumulating images help her imagine a life beyond her dark routine. But the story repeatedly tests what visual appeal can and cannot tell its characters. A landscape may be lovely and inhospitable; an imposing structure may be a wound in its surroundings; a person’s appearance may command attention without guaranteeing love. The power of beauty lies partly in its capacity to attract and console, and partly in the expectations it creates. Ugliness, damage, and disappointment expose those expectations to reality, making perception itself part of the characters’ journey.