The Odyssey is often thought of as a bit of a slog. The sort of book people think they know but never actually read. Fry challenges that. His Odyssey is not a straight retelling of Homer’s poem, nor a work through which Homer’s voice echoes and intertwines with another poet’s imagination, like Walcott’s Omeros. It is a continuation of his previous retellings of Greek myth and legend, such as Heroes, and follows the Greeks home after Troy.
Odyssey also follows in the footsteps of Fry’s previous work in that it is written in accessible, yet patently fun, prose. Fry balances clarity of expression, with a slightly self-indulgent desire to teach and explain these stories to a potential new audience. The tone is also carefully balanced to work with the humour, drama, despair and disturbing violence of Homer’s world. There is a necessary viscerality at times, but that does not remove the conversational nature of the authorial voice.
It is clear Fry has great affection, and wide knowledge of the stories he draws upon. His introduction includes Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’, both in translation and the original Greek, which is nice to see, even if the translator isn’t credited until the acknowledgements so could easily be missed. With the prevalence of retellings of, and works expanding on, Greek and Roman stories, it is important to not forget the earlier works that draw on those same sources.
Fry weaves in stories to cover not just Odysseus’s homecoming but also the homecoming of other Greek heroes. I suppose in a way it would have been hard not to include Agamemnon’s demise and the events that follow, and happily for Fry, it fits within the chronology. Perhaps in the mentions of Aeneas and Dido there is also the suggestion of future book, for Roman Myths seem overlooked in the current popularity for mythological retellings.
However, the Aeneas section did irk me slightly. Swapping directly from Greek to Roman deities feels overly jarring. I understand wanting to keep things simple, and there is some consideration of how the gods differ between Roman and Greek religion, but the brevity in which it is discussed and the inclusion of a table that suggests that each deity has a corresponding partner, is at best a simplification and at worst a distortion. I feel that, Fry, who made an interesting stylistic choice to change the names of the gods for that section, and so draw attention to the different, yet connected, nature of the sources (Virgil writing in, and arguably for, the Roman empire vs Homer’s much earlier oral tradition of a decentralised Greek speaking world), could have handled it better and so added to the richness of the characterisations.
By bringing in those other stories, Fry is also able to play with the narrative tension, skipping from character to character with skill, leaving threads dangling at his pleasure. That sense of authorial control is furthered by the chronology – for this is not a neat start to finish tale, but has episodic flashbacks.
Perhaps Fry’s Odessey could have greater depth and engagement with the complexities of those stories. However, it should be read in its present context. The points at which details were elided, such as the fate of the female house-slaves, are well covered by other recent books and to cover all aspects fully would take a library’s worth of annotated and cross-referenced books. It is also likely he felt it best not to mention the aftermath of Odysseus’s homecoming to keep the book acceptable for younger markets, without overly sanitising actions that should be horrifying.
All endings are somewhat arbitrary, and so choosing Odysseus revealing his identity, home in his palace, makes great sense for a story about homecoming.
Words by Ed Bedford
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