Across the (Homeric) Universe: Stephen Fry’s Odyssey
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyesThey call me on and on across the universeThoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter boxThey 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
