Title The Odyssey Series --- Author Homer Cover Art --- Publisher Collector's Library - 2004 First Printing --- Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, Athena Main Elements Gods, monsters

The Odyssey, a epic 12,000 line poem composed over 2,700 years ago, is the first adventure story in Western literature. It describes the ten-year wanderings of Odysseus in his quest to return home after the Trojan war. Hounded by the sea-god Poseidon and championed by the goddess Athena, he encounters giants, sorceresses and sea-monsters before finally reaching his beloved Ithaca. There he must endure the taunts of the suitors to his queen, Penelope, who have taken up residence in his palace. At once an enchanting fairytale and gripping drama, The Odyssey is eminently readable, not least for the rich complexity and magnetism of its hero. An inspiration to writers as diverse as Virgil, Swift and Joyce, The Odyssey has proved enormously influential and continues to captivate readers of all ages.

Continuing my journey through the Greek classics, I follow up The Iliad with The Odyssey. I don't think many call this pair of books a series or even a duology, and yet The Odyssey is by ever definition a sequel. And I enjoyed it a lot more than the other because instead of a bunch of guys fighthing non-stop for several hundred pages, there is actually an adventure story here.

My first reaction was "Oh no", that it would start in the middle of the story like The Iliad (the war had already been going for 10 years and you were supposed to know why there was a war and who everyone was), but as the tale progressed Odysseus' adventures are told and you get a pretty exciting fantasy novel. You have a goddess (Athena) that is supporting Odysseus and helping him get home, she is a main character in the story, interacting with him and the people around him. You have other gods that are not so happy with him (Poseidon was not thrilled that Odysses blinded his son the Cyclops). Each encounter is a famous legend in it's own right, such being captured by Circe, and by Calypso, or the most dangrous of all sea voyages passing between Scylla and Charybdis, something Jason in his Argo also had to overcome. He even has to make a stop in Hades to talk to the dead.

And even after he gets past all these monstrous challenges, he returns home to discover everyone thinks he is dead (it has been twenty years, and ten since most everyone else got home from Troy) and a large number of men have been hanging out in his house, eating his livestock and making a general nuisance of themselves in an attempt to woo and marry his wife Penelope. But Odysseus lost all his men in the return home and even if these lazy suitors aren't exactly the kind of warriors he had to face in the battle of Troy, he is just one man, his son, a swineherd and a goatherd. Not quite an army, so he has to rely on his wits, his trickster personality, and more than a little help from Athena.

Talking of his trickster personality, the guy can get a little annoying in his pleasure of weaving extravagant lies to deceive people, often not necessary, though useful at other times. You want to know how things work out, and you have to trudge through several pages of him making up a bunch of nonsense instead.

In the end, it was still first a poem (so there is certain structure and repetition that works itself even into a prose translation), and was written to please another audience from a couple millenia ago. A modern editor could certain do a good polish on it that would suit our tastes more, but as adventure fantasies go, I'd say it survived the test of time. The Iliad I had to force myself to get through fifty pages a day and often skimmed the million and one ways a guy can get killed, but here you have one protagonist with a couple important secondary characters, a smidge of mystery, a lot of action and plot, a little political intrigued...and yes, if you missed reading about people getting a spear in the nipple, there is one of those too (see my review of The Iliad for more on nipple and buttock spears). I even said to my Mom, "Hey, and no one gets a spear in his nipple in this one!" only to have it happen within two pages of picking up the book to finish off the last part. Oh well!

For The Iliad, I had to recommend seeing the movie instead, in those two hours not only would you know why there was a war, and get through the war, and find out how it ends (you don't get to the Trojan horse part and Achilles is still alive at the end of The Iliad, though you get a couple paragraphs in The Odyssey about this, again, you were just supposed to know). But for The Odyssey I'd recommend reading the book itself.

Virgil was so inspired by these books that he wrote a kind of sequel to them, the Aeneid...which I find kind of amusing at having authors add to another deceased author's works is quite a thing right now (Frank Herbert's son, Larsson's A Girl with a Dragon Tattoo series, Michael Cricton's work, etc) but apparently it has a long tradition!