The Odyssey

Pick it up: If you like retellings of Greek mythology and want a version that is erudite, well-written, and humorous, with a tempering of the blood and gore.

In this, the fourth and final book in his wonderful Greek quartet following Mythos, Heroes, and Troy, Stephen Fry tells the story of the Greeks beginning at the end of the 10-year Trojan war, when through the guile of Odysseus, the Greeks deceive the Trojans into sealing their own terrible fate when they allow the seemingly abandoned wooden horse into their city. Even the gods who were on the Greeks’ side cannot countenance the violence and brutality that followed, and the deceitful manner in which the war is finally won, and they are united (unusually) in wanting the Greeks to pay.

And they do in different ways - some with their lives, some with a longer journey home than they had hoped, and then there is Odysseus who cannot find his way for ten long years and is given up for dead. This is the story of his obstacle-laden journey home, to be reunited with his wife and son, and Fry tells it superbly.

But we also read about other characters we’ve encountered in Troy. Agamemnon and his death at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, the revenge of her children Orestes and Elektra, Orestes’s eventual trial...we also catch up with Menelaus and Helen in Sparta after the war, and we enjoy the constant bickering among the various gods and Zeus’s annoyance at being put in the middle of their conflicting allegiances. By the end of the tale, the gods are coming around to the view that the humans must now be left to their own devices.

Odysseus was no saintly hero. He was brutal and brash like the rest of the Greeks, the only distinction was that he was also tactical and shrewd. Fry’s retelling, with its use of a more modern idiom, is highly engaging and relatable, and can be read and enjoyed by younger readers as well (the gore is quite limited).

One does not have to have read the first three books in the quartet, they each stand quite well on their own.