Elfriede Jelinek Gier. Ein Unterhaltungsroman (Greed: An Entertainment) Rowohlt Verlag, October 2000, 400pp. ISBN 3-498-03334-4 'Flesh is only the means, money is the medium, and the highest value is the plot of land with a house on it', comments the narrator in this latest novel by the brilliantly hard-eyed, socially outspoken and inventive Elfriede Jelinek. Add to this observation the fact that the book is based on a murder - that of a young girl, Gabi, by a corrupt and brutal policeman generally known as the 'Gendarm' - and you might think you were about to read a cynical 'black' thriller, but nothing more. Given Jelinek's track record from the late 1960s onwards, nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. 'Light fiction', or 'pure entertainment', which comes as near as possible to translating its ironic sub-title, this book certainly is not. A calculated challenge to the Heimatroman school of novel-writing, the cosy idealisation of rural life and attitudes, it takes this provocative stance to extremes. The Gendarm usurps the true village law-enforcer's role to symbolise the disorder prevailing in rural Austria. Natural surroundings are at risk from people in cars. Sport, from jogging (an object of particular ridicule), to clandestine sexual encounters, is indulged in solely by the locals, the implication being that no tourist would go near this unlovely dump. But if the rural environment harbours death and destruction, Vienna, briefly visited, is found to be no less spoiled in its bourgeois, competitive way. Everywhere the driving force is greed. Sex is de-eroticised and sometimes almost unbearably brutal, another component of a radical aesthetic which seeks to reverse the cosiness of the 'light' novel. Extensive passages are devoted to 'nature', especially to the lake in which the murdered girl's body lies hidden, but with the literary cult of anthropomorphism stood on its head. With its linguistic playfulness, still quite rare in German literature, and its polemical, topical references (from Jörg Haider to Kosovo), this is a fine and gripping performance by an author still breaking new ground.