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Stephen Fry’s Odyssey is the ultimate instalment in his retellings of Greek delusion that started with Mythos. Right here, Fry tells us, we transfer away from the turbulent creation of the gods and the swashbuckling heroes of outdated, into “a profoundly human story”: a story of 1 man’s journey house “to a world of farm and household”.
However it seems that, considerably surprisingly, the “hero” who’s on the lookout for house isn’t solely Odysseus. In Odyssey’s first half, regardless of the title, we discover the Odysseus story interweaving with these of Agamemnon, Ajax (the one who raped Cassandra and triggered Athena’s wrath upon the returning Greeks), Menelaus and Helen, and even the Trojan, Aeneas. So this story isn’t nearly an Odyssey: it’s about many returns house.
And that is true to the world by which the Homeric epics have been composed. We all know that there have been a number of oral tales of various “returns” (“nostoi” in Greek) from the Trojan battle. Every of the Greek heroes who have been mentioned to have sailed again from Troy – Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, for instance, or Menelaus, husband of Helen – doubtless had their very own return poem. It’s an amazing tragedy that the Odyssey is the one one of many return epics we now have left to us.
Everyone knows, by now, the attraction and wit that Fry brings to his delusion retellings; and, for a lot of readers, this shall be a pleasant entry level to the story of the Odyssey, in addition to the opposite return myths. It gives up a palatable and entertaining model of Homer’s epic, sprinkled with the tales of Agamemnon and the Home of Atreus. It sparkles with Fry’s trademark light-hearted fashion and, certain as something, delivers a ripping good yarn.
The person heroes are woven with perception and a lightness of contact, whereas a sure roguishness characterises a lot of the humour – for instance, when Odysseus and his son Telemachus poke their tongues out at one another after they meet. And, as one would anticipate from the previous presenter of QI, there’s an abounding enjoyment of exploring etymologies, typically in prolonged footnotes (simply to offer an instance: one covers every thing from a Greek hero to the genus of albatrosses). The infectious enthusiasm for information is contagious and Fry manages to hold off even a 12-line footnote.
But the simplification of the tales – and Fry appears, at instances, to be nicely conscious of it – comes at a price; significantly in a sure bluntness of characterisation, and particularly relating to girls. As an illustration, within the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming the place he returns to Greece and his spouse Clytemnestra kills him in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. In Fry’s retelling Agamemnon is introduced very a lot as the great father who was merely doing his obligation by killing his daughter; whereas Clytemnestra is the dangerous mom who’s glad to have removed her youngsters.
In the meantime, Odysseus’ well-known return to Ithaca after 20 years can be portrayed with a twist. Within the Odyssey, Odysseus comes house within the guise of a beggar and finds Penelope beset by suitors who consider he has died. Penelope proposes a bow competitors, the winner of which could have her hand in marriage. Odysseus wins and takes violent revenge upon the suitors.
In Fry’s retelling this story turns into a romantic fairytale with the hero sweeping in and decreasing the grateful spouse to her knees, relatively than the altogether extra complicated drama of delusion. There isn’t a discomfort at Odysseus’ infidelity. There isn’t a suggestion that Penelope may need labored out that the beggar in disguise was Odysseus. At one significantly uncomfortable second, Fry makes Odysseus provide you with the thought of the competition of the bow (it was completely Penelope’s, through Athena). Above all, nonetheless, he excises Telemachus’ horrendous hanging of the 12 enslaved girls (for the “crime” of being raped by the suitors). As an alternative, Fry presents these girls as “having fun with very particular relationships with sure of the suitors”.
Fry’s Odyssey is an entertaining retelling that thrums with Fry’s charming, quick-witted prose. It’s, certainly, a story searching for “a hero”. However the Odyssey shouldn’t be, ultimately, a easy story of a hero who finds his approach house.
To current Odysseus because the ingenious mastermind behind the competition of the bow (not Penelope) and the devoted husband on his return; to current Telemachus because the keen son who doesn’t commit an terrible slaughter of raped enslaved girls, is to create a sure view of the Odyssey.
It’s a well-recognized one, to make sure. However it’s price remembering that the Odyssey itself accommodates different avenues; that it has different – to cite Margaret Atwood who herself re-imagined the story from Penelope and the twelve hanged girls’s perspective – “darker alleyways”. I’m wondering what we’re to make of the truth that, in Fry’s Odyssey, a few of them are left unexplored.
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