"Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson

 This is described as a modern epic poem although I could see little that was distinctively poetic about it apart from the fact that it is written in alternately long and short lines and that punctuation is no guide as to when these lines will end. Some of these lines use words in an interesting and original way but it is mostly narrative. 

It is a bildungsroman, chronicling the childhood and young adulthood of Geryon. He is described as a monster, as red, and as having wings. I presume that these features are a way of symbolising the fact that he is different. Nevertheless, he goes to school, albeit reluctantly. He is bullied by his elder brother who also, it is implied, sexually abuses him. As a young gay man he begins an affair with Herakles, a very confident, manly man who treats him as a sex object. Later, he goes  to Latin America and studies; he also takes photographs. By chance he re-encounters Herakles who now has a Indian American boyfriend called Ancash (which means Blue in a South American Indian language although the reader is never told this). Herakles wants Geryon and Ancash. The relationship ends in tears.

It is a charming and sensitive portrait of a young gay man.

Selected quotes:

• “It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.” (31)
• “The hour of six pm flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on and white bedspreads sprang forward.” (32)
• “Herakles’ gaze on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.” (33)
• “Herakles liked to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear taking the lid off a jar of honey.” (34)

September 2025; 147 pages

First published in Canada by Alfred A Knopf in 1998

My Penguin Vintage Classics paperback edition was issued in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Stone Blind" by Natalie Haynes

 A retelling of the myth of Perseus killing the gorgon Medusa and rescuing Andromeda, much of it seen from the point of view of Medusa. It confronts the reader with the moralities of the situation - the male Olympians are serial rapists, Medusa is very much a victim, Perseus has no defensible reason for killing her, or cheating the Graiai - and questions the 'othering' of 'monsters'. It does this by narrating things from a very modern perspective although it never seriously questions the hierarchy.

The conceit of portraying the characters as if they were modern men and women (rather as also done by Stephen Fry in, for example, Mythos and Heroes) is frequently delightful and often very funny although I felt towards the end that this was insufficient to carry the whole book. Nevertheless, it certainly cuts the gods and heroes down to size (although the Greek myths already portray the gods as having very human failings; perhaps this exercise should be repeated for gods who are still worshipped or would that be blasphemy?). 

I was not convinced that Perseus was, as the voice of the head of Medusa tells us, "a vicious little thug". He's much more complicated than that. There are times when he is heroic - if heroism is to act despite overwhelming fear - such as when he climbs the cliffs or faces the sea-monster. He is repeatedly humiliated, for example by Athena for not being as clever as she is and by the kleptomaniacal Hesperides when they catch him skinny-dipping. Fundamentally he is a plaything of the gods. When he is wicked it is, perhaps, not because of who he is but because he is burdened with unrealistic expectations and, later, too much power. 

And how does Athena get away without censure for what she does to Medusa? 

Nevertheless, there are some wonderfully funny scenes, such as the conversations between Perseus, Hermes and Athena, and the wonderfully comic Hesperides, and there are some fabulous characterisations. This is, above all, a brilliantly comic novel.

I was disappointed not to find out whether Perseus did, in the end, kill his grandfather.

Selected quotes:

• "Hera and Zeus were ideally matched, at least in terms of their capacity to antagonize one another. There were days when she believed he could scarcely rise from his bed without seducing or raping someone." (1: Hera)
• "Zeus was on the verge of saying he had never seen anything more beautiful unless she was naked, when he caught sight of his wife's eyes ... and decided that perhaps some thoughts were better left unsaid." (1: Hera)
• "Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were." (1: Medusa)
• "Being afraid of dying must be especially awful, because there was no hope of avoiding it." (1: Danae)
• "Even the birds had stopped singing, as though they knew he was going the wrong way and couldn't bear to watch." (3: The Graiai)
• "He had learned to assess travellers by however well or ill prepared they appeared for whatever was to come. These two looked like what was to come would have to prepare for them." (3: The Graiai)
• "He's just a bag of meat wandering around irritating people." (4: Athene)

A very funny comic novel.

For a totally different modernisation of Greek myth, read Country by Michael Hughes, which updates the Iliad, setting it in Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles. 

March 2024; 368 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"House of Names" by Colm Toibin

 Loosely based on the Oresteiad and told from the perspectives of Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra in the first person and Orestes in the third person. 

This summary of the plot contains spoilers: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get fair winds so he can sail off to war. His wife Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, can't forgive this. So, she starts a relationship with Aegisthus, a rival claimant for the throne, and, when Agamemnon returns, Clytemnestra murders him. She and Aegisthus begin a reign of tyranny, kidnapping the children of leading citizens in order to ensure their compliance. Clytemnestra's son Orestes is also sent away with these boys but he and another boy Leander escape with Mitros, a very sick boy. They find refuge at the house of an old woman. After some years, the old woman and Mitros die and Orestes and Leander return home. Leander joins the rebels while Orestes, still ignorant of who killed his father, resumes his place at the palace. But, when he discovers what really happened, he kills his mother. The rebels capture the palace.

I just didn't understand why Toibin used the characters and much of the story from an incredibly well-known myth and then introduced such significant differences. If you want to rewrite the story, change the names. Otherwise you run the risk of readers like me becoming distracted by the discrepancies. And they're not little tweaks. I can just about accept the truncation of the war from ten years to three, although this means that it doesn't really give time for Orestes to grow up. But the fundamental is in the character of Orestes, here portrayed as young, naive and rather wimpy (despite committing several murders). In the original he is faced with a stark choice: he has to fulfil his duty of avenging his father's death but the only way he can do this is by matricide. And the aftermath is that he is driven mad by guilt and that it is only after he has been tried and shown mercy that he can resume his kingly duties (becoming a rather unpleasant warlord). None of that is in here. So Toibin has taken away the fundamental dramatic and psychological crux of the story to produce this emasculated, rationalised version. So why keep the names?

Of course it is beautifully written. It's Toibin. He's good. 

Selected quotes:

• "I know as no one else knows that the gods ... care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree." (Clytemnestra, 1)
• "Leander and Orestes possessed a set of references that were like a private language; in the old woman's house, the discussion of weather or food of farm animals had evolved into a sort of mild banter with many comments exchanged on each other's failings and incapacities." (Orestes 1) I like this quote but it appears after the sojourn with the old woman almost as an afterthought: this 'banter' has not been shown before; I think it should have been.

February 2023; 262 pages

Other books by Colm Toibin reviewed in this blog:

• The Testament of Mary
• Brooklyn

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Troy" by Stephen Fry

This retelling of the story of the Trojan War is a sequel to Fry's Mythos and Heroes, both of which I adored.  It preserves Fry's inimitable style of making his characters thoroughly modern yet telling the story traditionally. There are some delicious moments of humour. 

But the first third of the book, in which Fry attempts to make sense of a hugely complex back story, is very difficult. Only occasionally does a character come to life. As soon as we reach the final year of the war, and the Homeric story and beyond, the story becomes vivid and absorbing. Homer, of course, could assume that his listeners understood the back story; Fry can't. But I did wonder whether the origins of Paris, cast away on the hillside, and the birth of Helen from an egg hatched by her mother who had coupled with Zeus in the form of a swan, and the origins of the House of Atreides would have been better done as footnotes as the action was progressing. Either that, or do it like George Martin and turn the story into a whole series of books.

Nevertheless, Fry's erudition is displayed as is his enormous wit.

Selected quotes: (page references from the Penguin paperback edition)

• "They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all." (p 11)
• "The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death." (p 44)
• "As Luck would have it - Luck? No, Faith, Providence, Destiny ... Doom, perhaps, but not Luck, certainly not Luck." (p 53)
• "Antenor was a seasoned courtier. Courtiers do not survive long enough to be seasoned unless they maintain an efficient network of spies and informers." (p 166)

November 2022; 352 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tales of the Greek Heroes" by Roger Lancelyn Green

This is one of the books that I read when I was young, together with the Tale of Troy and the Saga of Asgard by the same author, that made me adore old myths (and must be at least partly responsible for my atheism, for if these colourful stories are untrue why should the rather less colourful stories from the Bible be true?).

Reading the book again as a much older reader I realise the skill that went into telling for children these often complex, frequently bloodthirsty, and from time to time sexy myths. The author can do little with the multiply sinful story of Oedipus except to say "Then Oedipus ruled well and wisely at Thebes, until a curse fell upon the land because of crimes which he had committed unintentionally, and he wandered away as a blind beggar" (C 8; surely the most Mrs Grundyish summary of parricide and incest in the whole of literature). However, normally he simplifies the sometimes contradictory accounts and produces a sanitised but exciting boys' own adventure story. We have the early stories of Zeus and Cronos, of Prometheus, and of the great flood. The central part of the book deals with the labours of Hercules. Finally we learn about Jason and the Argonauts and the Battle with the Giants.

First published in 1958 but still very readable.

A more grown up version of these stories is provided by Stephen Fry with Mythos and Heroes.

"In the Footsteps of Orpheus" by R F Paget

This books was written in 1967 about amateur archaeologist's Paget's own excavations of tunnels at Baiae, near Naples. He concludes that these are the tunnels on which Vergil based the visit to the underworld of Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid. Certainly Aeneas is said to have visited Cuma, to visit the Sibyl there, and Lake Avernus; both of these locations are enormously close to Baiae. Peget concludes that the tunnels he excavated were used in Orphic rites in which a suppliant was led to an underground river (identified as the Styx) fed by thermal springs.

It's a fascinating theory marred, as so often in the work of non-academics, by fleshing out facts with flights of fancy. Thus towards the end Paget reconstructs a suppliants journey from the account of a ceremony at another Oracle, as if it applied to these tunnels. Leaps of faith include:

• "we and everyone that we have taken down the Oracle, has immediately recognised the Entrance to Tartarus, the River Styx and the Gates of Ivory and of Horn, just as they were described by Vergil" (p 159)
• “The speech of Anchises proves the Vergil was a devout Orphic.” (p 157)
• “We just knew we were sitting on the banks of the River Styx. We both drank some of the water, and found it was potable." (p 114)

One of the most serious flaws is that he uses Homer Odyssey as if it recounted a real voyage by a real man and further assumes that it is evidence of Odysseus visiting Baiae in his voyage to the Underworld. Paget ignores or is unaware of the body of work that places the land of the dead in Homer outside the Pillars of Hercules, ie in the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean (eg Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford). He assumes that the Perpetual Mist of which Homer speaks is in fact fumes from the volcanically active region around Naples. He then goes on to use this purported voyage as a dating reference.

Another flaw with Paget's book is that he tends to divorce the archaeology, with its measurements and angles and careful descriptions, with the interpretation. I would have liked to have seen the evidence for each Vergilian reference to be linked with the archaeological evidence.

These weaknesses perhaps explain why Paget's discoveries, which should have been historic, are more or less unknown.

The thesis in this book needs to be treated with extreme caution , but it is full of fascinating ideas.

June 2020; 199 pages

Also read:

• Virgil's Aeneid by David Ross
• The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble, a work of fiction in which the narrator studies Virgil and travels to Naples

"Heroes" by Stephen Fry

This book was a birthday present from my wonderful step-daughter Alexa. It is a sequel to Mythos, which it often references.

Fry tells the story of the key Ancient Greek heroes: Perseus, the Labours of Heracles, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason and the Argonauts not to mention the wicked Medea, Atalanta, Oedipus and Theseus and the Minotaur. Fry writes with a beautifully simple, indeed elegant, narrative style and yet he brings an utterly alien world, in which the gods regularly intervene, to our modern sensibility by casting his heroes as real people with real personalities. Thus:

• “Perseus had never believed his mother's wild story about Zeus coming to her as a shower of golden rain. He had taken it for granted that his real father was some itinerant musician or tinker whose name she had never discovered.”
• Heracles "was, as we might say today, far from the brightest pixel on the screen.”
• “Orpheus was the Mozart of the ancient world. He was more than that. Orpheus was the Cole Porter, the Shakespeare, the Lennon and McCartney, the Adele, Prince, Luciano Pavarotti, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar of the ancient world.”

At the same time Fry brings his customary erudition to bear with knowledgeable and insightful comments:

• “Twins were forming in her womb, two sons - one fathered by Zeus and the other by Amphitryon. This phenomenon of polyspermy is common enough in littering mammals like cats, dogs, and pigs, but is rare in humans. Rare, but not unknown. It rejoices in the name heteropaternal superfecundation.”
• “It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labours, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.”
• Hymen was the half brother of Orpheus. “A minor deity of song (he gave us the word ‘ hymn’) Hymen served as one of the Erotes (the young men in the love god Eros’s retinue), with a special responsibility for weddings and the marriage bed. Our words ‘hymen’ and ‘hymenal’ also derive from him.”
• “Love came to peasants, kings and even gods. Love made all equal. Love deified, yet love levelled.”
• “Human sacrifice, especially involving the young, was now looked on as barbaric, an unwanted legacy from the days when gods and men were crueller. But gods and men never lose their cruelty.”
• “In a fight, do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to.”
• “Their heroism, perhaps, derived from their ability to bring their mix of the human and the divine to bear against the grinding pressures of fate.”
• “He may have been the first cruel, abusive and unfit parent to reclaim a child once they became famous or rich, but he would certainly not be the last.”
• “Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of enquiry of which the Athenians were so proud - logic, numbers, rhetoric, order and discovery - only to reveal a truth that is disordered, shameful, transgressive and bestial.”

Heroes, like Mythos, has been a joy to read and I hope that Fry is hard at work preparing a third volume in the series, about the Trojan War and the Voyages of Odysseus. Please.

Brilliant perfection. March 2019; 415 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Myths of the Greeks and Romans" by Michael Grant

Yet another wonderful book lent to me by my mate Fred whose other contributions include:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad but an author who writes like a dream
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles  a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis

This loan was possibly in response to my lending him Mythos by the brilliant Stephen Fry; also heartily recommended.

To read Grant's book is a little like exploring in a slightly chaotic museum. Each chapter is based around a tale told by some wonderful writer; he starts with Homer and the Wrath of Achilles, and moves through the Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex by Sophocles to Virgil, Ovid and Apuleius. And having recounted the substance of the story he then tells you about its context, historical and archaeological findings, biographies of the writers and some description about the styles of work that they were using, and then their influences all the way through the Andre Gide. So even if you are, as I am, more or less familiar with the story itself, there is a wealth of other information. It's like web-surfing. One thing leads to another in a wonderful voyage of slightly haphazard discovery.

Some of the things I learned:

C3000 BC the stone age inhabitants of Greece were supplanted by bronze agers “possibly from Asia Minor ... probably of non-Indo-European origin” (p 32)

“on the Greek mainland., people speaking a language somewhat resembling Greek, and perhaps originating from the South Russian steppes, began to arrive during the first centuries of the second millennium BC.” (p 32) Culture part Cretan part Hittite, part new. (p 32 - 33) Myceneans using written Linear B. c1250 BC they “besieged and burnt” Troy. (p 33)

The name Hector appears in Linear B tablet. (p 33) Homer’s mentions of “the huge shield of Ajax like a tower, Hector’s bronze helmet, the cup of Nestor, the silver-studded swords, and the only reference to writing, are traceable to the Mycenaean age.” (p 34)

Dorians invaded Greece through Balkans pushing Aeolians and Ionians into Asia Minor c1150 - 1100 BC. Dark Age until c700 BCE. (p 35) Writing vanishes untril Homer c 750 - 700 BCE. (p 36)

We can see Homeric poems intended for oral transmission because there are 25,000 repeated phrases in 28,000 lines of Iliad and Odyssey. (p 36) Poems prob 1st published by King Pisistratus of Athens; present division in 24 books may date from the third century BCE. (p 37)

“Cremation ... is the universal Homeric practice, whereas the normal Mycenaean custom had been inhumation.” (p 39)

There are “detailed echoes” in the Iliad and the Odyssey of Ugaritic poems “mainly of fourteenth century date, belong to the north western branch of the Semitic languages ... written in Canaanite alphabetic cuneiform, foreshadowing the Phoenician alphabet which was to come to Greece in the eighth century BC” (p 49) eg dogs are popular in the Odyssey and Ugarit “but nowhere else in the Semitic world” (p 50) At about this time “ the Greeks borrowed, first, the Phoenician alphabet, and then ... the many ‘orientalizing’ artistic features, fantastic monsters and the like, for which Phoenicia was the natural intermediary between Greek lands and the near or middle east - Babylon and Assyria, with their roots in the Sumerian past.” (p 50)

The Iliad introduces the hero: “The hero must use his superior qualities at all times to excel and win applause, call that is the reward and demonstration of his manhood. He makes honour his paramount code, and glory the driving force and aim of his existence. ... his ideals are courage, endurance, strength and beauty.” (p 51) Homeric heroes are “violently emotional, and of erratic temperamental stability.” (p 52) “Heroism leads to misery and death, honour to slaughter ... there is pity for the shortness of heroes’ lives and the waste caused by their anger and pride.” (p 55)

“The meeting of Achilles, at the end of the poem, with the bereaved father of his enemy is in profound contrast to slaughter and human sacrifice; it is like the Reversal or Recoil which was later to be the hallmark of many an Athenian tragedy ... out of the degradation and misery comes compassion.” (p 57)

“The Odyssey is a collection of folk-tales and fairy-tales.” (p 81) It is more complicated than the Iliad: “an epic changing into a novel. ... mind and character now prevail over circumstances” (p 86)

The story of the castration of Uranus by Cronos is “distinctly similar” to the Epic of Kumarbi “evidently translated from Hittite in Hurrian” and the Apollodorus variant localizes the event at Mount “Cassi (Hazzi) in north-western Syria (on the Turkish border) just as the Hurrian-Hittite story does.” (p 114)

Thespis was the first dramatist whose name is known. “It may well have been he who converted ‘the answer to the chorus’ ... into a regular actor impersonating a character ... responding to the chorus not in a choral metre but in the characteristic iambic verse-pattern of tragic narration, imitating the cadences of speech.” (p 176)

“The chorus complements, illustrates, universalizes, or dramatically justifies the course of events; it comments or moralizes or mythologizes upon what happens, and opens up the spiritual dimension of the theme or displays the reaction of public opinion.” TS Eliot suggestive that it makes things more intense by showing them to the audience twice. (p 177)

Aeschylus introduced “a second actor, which created the possibility of a dramatic situation or conflict.” (p 179)

“Oedipus ... entered, as WB Yeats paraphrased the lines, through the door that had sent him wailing forth.” (p 229)

“Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex ... is more disturbing in its savagery ... suggesting at times the incantations of Christian liturgy and implications of Christian theology ... man is dominated but may find his own redemption, and light comes to Oedipus when he loses his eyes.” (p 232)

Xenophanes claimed that people created Gods in their own image:

“Horses’ gods are like horses, like kine the gods of kine. 

‘Snub-nosed are the Immortals, and black’ the Ethiops say; 

But ‘No’ the Thracians answer, red-haired, with eyes of grey.” 

If there is one god how can he be fashioned in the likeness of man? (p 264)

In a fragment of his Sisyphus Critias suggests that humans invented gods replaced conscience. (p 265)

In a fragment of the lost Bellerophon Euripides suggests that the problem of evil means gods don’t exist (p 267)

“Strabo believed Jason was looking for gold, and explained that the Cochians collected the dust from the river in fleecy skins. According to the Byzantine Suidas, the fleece was a parchment book explaining how to obtain gold by alchemy” (p 298)

“The earliest known mention of a wife of Orpheus is in Plato's Symposium.” (p 310)

“Orphism is close ... to the ascetic mystery religion and way of life established in southern Italy during the later sixth century [BC] by Pythagoras.” (p 313)

“In the fifth century ... the Greeks invented ‘Romus’ (Rhomos) as a typical aponymous city-founder. In Italy, the form Romulus became current - ‘the Roman’ ... When the Greeks heard of Romulus, they differentiated him from Romus” which led to Romulus and Remus. (p 355)

“The Etruscans became identifiable shortly before 700 BC as a separate civilization, occupied in trade, industry and agriculture, but particularly in piracy and war. They made great use of horses, introducing at the chariot to Italy. Etruscan strength came from the working of metals: the copper of Tuscany and the iron of Elba were perhaps what had tempted them to settle, and the whole of rorthern Etruria became a region of mines.” (p 365)

“Deluge myths occur in thirty-four out of a specimen group of fifty among the world’s mythologies.” (p 400)

“The Deucalion version [of the flood] ... may perhaps enshrine memories of a post-Paleolithic epoch in Greece itself, when central Thessaly became a lake.” (p 401)

Isn't it a joy?

March 2018; 430 pages

"Mythos" by Stephen Fry

Fry takes us through the earlier Greek myths, including the creation, but not including the labours of Hercules, the siege of Troy and its Oresteian and Odyssean aftermaths, or the story of Theseus etc. Perhaps there was just too much.

But what he has given us is his own retelling of some of the less-well-known stories. The ones that lurk in the corners of the cultural subconscious (or did for those of us with some sort of traditional British education). As such it enlightened many dark pockets of my ignorance. I had heard of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he had carved, the classical reference underpinning the GBS play that metamorphosed into My Fair Lady, but I had never read the story. I was dimly aware of the story of Hero and Leander, one of whom drowned swimming the Hellespont, but I knew no details. Again and again Fry fleshed out the bare bones of my knowledge. And told me how these stories had passed into our culture by, for example, citing the poems by Byron or Keats or the passages in Shakespeare that had referred to them.

There was a huge western European culture built around these ideas. Young people today are ignorant of much of it (although the themes are often reprised without their knowledge in computer games, sci-fi serials, and soap operas). It is sad that so much cultural heritage is slipping away although of course it was only available to the public-school educated elite and there is a great deal of wonderful culture that is replacing it. I was ashamed of my ignorance. After all, I am a few months older than him, we had similar educations (although I wasn't expelled) and our times at Cambridge overlapped. But I studied science and that is a huge culture in itself. Life is too short for everything.

The real joy of this book is the way that Fry writes. He retells these stories of Gods and mortals in the most human way possible. For example, Ganymede is such a beautiful youth that both men and women are lovestruck on meeting him. “When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhyme ‘thighs’ with ‘eyes’, ‘hips’ with ‘lips’, ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’ and ‘desire’ with ‘fire’.” (p 306) It is the "instantly tore up" that makes the imagery so quotidian, so mundane, and so real you can touch it, poke it, prod it and squish it. These are humans. “A compound of village gossip, nosy neighbour and over-solicitous best friend, Echo found it impossible to hold her tongue.” (p 333) I know Echo. She lives down the street.

And then there is the erudition. Legend, we are told,  “derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning ‘to be read’. Interestingly, the absolute origin of the verb legere and its supine form lectum bears the meaning of ‘gather’ - as in ‘college’ and ‘collect’.” (p 403 & fn) This single example will have to suffice for the learning that is displayed on every single page of this brilliant book.

Selected quotes:

• “Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.” (p 3)
• “In time you will abandon your trousers - not yet, I hope - and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned.” (p 4)
• “It was a sickle. An enormous scythe whose great curved blade had been forged from adamantine, which means ‘ untameable’. (p 16)
• “Our word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart’, just as in the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart’.” (p 59)
• “If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.” (p 67)
• “The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous not especially vicious ... were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: before they arrived they drink of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.” (p 144)
• “In this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved.” (p 227)
• “Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves.” (p 344)
• “Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.” (p 403)

There is only one thing missing from this book. All the other stories! Please, Mr Fry, let us have the stories of the heroes, Theseus and Hercules and Achilles and Ulysses and Oedipus and Orestes and Antigone and Medea and Jason and ...

And then perhaps you can move to the Viking gods who are just as much fun.

January 2018; 410 pages

I am delighted that the series has been continued with Heroes.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God