Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe
— “Across the Universe”, The Beatles (written by John Lennon)
I start with a quote from the Beatles for this review of Stephen Fry’s Odyssey because this book is not quite what I expected, and it encapsulates the main narrative of the book. Odyssey, the fourth book in his Mythos series (and honestly I had thought Troy, his third, would be his last)1 takes the form much more like Troy than the first two. Just as Troy was not a straight-up retelling of The Iliad, but rather the entire Trojan War from Troy’s origins (which at the time of reading that, I was rather fuzzy on) all the way to its start, and its finish. As you know, Bob, The Iliad isn’t even the end of the War, but rather just a pivotal episode in it. But he does go on to describe the end events of the Trojan War, and leaves us with Troy sacked and destroyed.
And so we wind up with Odyssey, now. Odyssey does not have the titular The, and this is not, in fact, Odysseus’ story, or more belike, *just* Odysseus’ story. It is the story of all those that left the site after the end of the war. Odysseus, yes, but also Diomedes, Agammenon, and Menelaus. And, as it so happens, a survivor on the Trojan side…Aeneas.
The setup of the book takes an event that Odysseus describes in one of his many tellings of his prior adventures to his various hosts2 and tells that, straight. For the first two-thirds of the book, Fry tells things from a forward perspective in this regard, rather than it being recounted to us by someone else. In Odysseus’ retelling, the ships leaving Troy were all hit by the Gods’ wrath (the Greeks did not sacrifice properly or richly enough, and did some very bad things) and so ALL the fleets and travelers home had difficulties. This re-contextualizes Odysseus’ plight as just the *worst* of them all, and so we intercut and jump between the fates of the various Greek heroes.
Fry is a synthesizer and remixer of Greek myths and stories. He takes from every source he can find and puts it into his own telling. For a lot of the post-Trojan War stuff, then, he talks about drawing from various Greek plays, as well as Virgil’s the Aeneid (more on Aeneas in a moment). This gives him some more material than usual for his work, but it also means that, unlike the first three books, the wide-ranging alternatives of various characters are gone. In Mythos and Heroes, Fry struck home the idea, time and again, that there were often a dozen or more stories or contradictory details about characters. When we’ve gotten to the timeframe of The Odyssey, that is now gone. “Canon Formation” has happened, and, focusing on Odysseus again, there aren’t “alternate Odysseus stories” about his journey home in the extant literature3.
So we get Agamemnon, fated to be killed by his wife Clymenestra, and the whole tragic series of stories that herald the end of the Atreus family that we find in Aeschylus. We get something quite new to me in the fate of Meneleus, who got blown about the Mediterranean and wound up in Egypt, briefly. We get Aeneas, who does go to Italy to start the line that will found Rome, but not without his dalliance in Carthage, and with Dido. We follow all of these adventures, as well as the “early adventures” of Odysseus.
Eventually though, we go full-on Odysseus, and the narrative frame of telling all of these stories falls away into a more straightforward retelling of The Odyssey, completely (and disappointingly to me) following The Odyssey’s pattern of having Odysseus tell stories of his prior adventures not already recounted, to various hosts. This feels like a disappointment to me, a gear shift in the book that doesn’t quite work. After taking pains to make this Odyssey rather than The Odyssey, in the end, Fry bows to the power of Homer, and starts to straight-up tell The Odyssey. All the beats that we know from his post-Calypso sojourn are here, including the beats with Telemachus (his son) and Odysseus telling his story to anyone who will listen4. Odysseus eventually returns in disguise, with Athena’s help, and the suitors of his long suffering wife Penelope are dealt with.
You may know this story even if you haven’t read The Odyssey. Certainly some of Odysseus’ story has permeated popular culture. “No man has blinded me!” Circe and her penchant to transform men into animals. Scylla and Charbydis come from the Odyssey, too. And of course coming home and slaughtering all the men who have been harassing your patient and loyal wife for 20 years.
The Odyssey ends with the finale of that strife, but Fry does borrow from an earlier book in The Odyssey and makes it clear that, once the suitors are dealt with, Odysseus does have his one final journey with the oar on his shoulder. This is an episode of The Odyssey that doesn’t get as much play in adaptations, since it’s something that Tiresias tells him he must do but it takes place after the events of the main narrative. And that journey and those sacrifices can be truly seen to be the end of Odyssey, and the Greco-Roman myth cycle. In the course of the book, he has brought Aeneas to face Turnus and the end of that story cycle.
And with that, the Greek Myth cycle that started with Mythos really is over. The Greco-Roman Gods and Goddesses, who, as Fry has noted, have been withdrawing more and more from human affairs, end their active engagement entirely. No more divine children, no more getting messed up in human affairs.The mythological era is done, and what is left goes to History.
There are plenty of writers who have been tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey or elements thereof for their stories lately and reimagining them. Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing), Madeline Miller (Song of Achilles), Natalie Haynes (A Thousand Ships). Claire North and her Penelope novels. Clytemnestra: A Novel by Costanza Casati. Black Ships by Jo Graham. And a host of others. There was the drama miniseries Troy: Fall of a City which used POC actors extensively and changed some elements of the end of Troy story.
So what place is there for Stephen Fry’s work? The four volumes of the Mythos project are clearly a passion project of his, and while (ironic pun intended) Fry often plays it very straight and down the middle with the stories (even more so, as noted here, in Odyssey than in prior ones), the four books do provide a comprehensive look at the corpus of Greco-Roman mythology, soup to nuts. Fry is not in competition with the authors above; he is more in dialogue and presenting himself in the mold of Bulfinch and Hamilton. His is a more modern (and definitely queer friendly) take on the myths and their stories, from Creation to Odysseus’ Oar. Fry’s chatty and conversational style (and more than a bit of droll humor) may not be for everyone, and sometimes, he winkingly throws in a bit of modernism in dialogue here and there. He’s having fun with the material, from beginning all the way to this volume. Fry’s Mythos project is of our time just like his prior synthesizers of myth were in their time.
And I think there is an importance in not ceding the field, as it were. Fry is part of the movement, as seen above, in recontextualizing and using these classical stories, because there is a very virulent strain on the Right side of the political spectrum that already has twisted notions of Greco-Roman mythology and culture and thinks that it should be hearkened back to, on their own political terms5. The Mythos cycle, then, stands as a way to enjoy and think about this myth cycle from a far, far more palatable perspective. And as a longtime fan of Greek Mythology, since I started reading it about the same time I discovered SF, is it any wonder that Odyssey and the earlier books by Fry resonated with me so? And any wonder why I would bring this to an SFF blog for review?
And with that, the Mythos cycle really does this time come to a close. I only have Kindle and audio versions of the books, but I could see myself getting hardcovers in the precious amount of shelf space I have, so I can dip into Fry’s versions again and again.
1 I reviewed Troy at Nerds of a Feather [http://www.nerds-feather.com/2022/08/microreview-book-troy-by-stephen-fry.html]. In that review, I wrote it as if Troy was in fact the last of the series, because the end matter, and talking about the time of Man, it seemed that, even with the mythological elements in the Odyssey, that he seemed to be wrapping up the project with the end of the series and trilogy with Troy and I urged him to keep using his mythological curiosity.
2 Did Homer invent the flashback? He certainly codified it.
3 Are there lost manuscripts where there are more and different stories about Odysseus’ journey? I am sure if there was a large corpus of lost manuscripts, they would be summarized or mentioned in a manuscript or document we DO have and thus we’d know that they once existed. There are some story details in this work, not about Odysseus, from lost manuscripts that were summarized elsewhere.
4 In 5e D&D terms, Odysseus has levels in Bard as well as Fighter and Rogue. If we are going back to the original 1e Bard, he clearly followed the Fighter-Rogue-Bard path. Maybe one of the reasons Fry likes to tell Odysseus’ story is that Odysseus like himself IS a storyteller, and perhaps he could not in the end resist having the storyteller be a storyteller. Or maybe the power and pull of Homer’s form could not in the end be resisted.
5 The kind of people who want to restore “classical architecture” but can’t be bothered or care that ancient Greek and Roman buildings were colorful, painted affairs. They want stark unpainted marble, because they fundamentally don’t understand a tenth of what they think they do.
