Odyssey by Stephen Fry – the tales of return from the Trojan war are charmingly retold but at an uncomfortable cost
Stephen Fry’s Odyssey is the final instalment in his retellings of Greek myth that began with Mythos. Here, Fry tells us, we move away from the turbulent creation of the gods and the swashbuckling heroes of old, into “a profoundly human story”: a tale of one man’s journey home “to a world of farm and family”.
But it turns out that, somewhat surprisingly, the “hero” who is looking for home isn’t only Odysseus. In Odyssey’s first half, despite the title, we find the Odysseus story interweaving with those of Agamemnon, Ajax (the one who raped Cassandra and caused Athena’s wrath upon the returning Greeks), Menelaus and Helen, and even the Trojan, Aeneas. So this story isn’t just about an Odyssey: it’s about many returns home.
And this is true to the world in which the Homeric epics were composed. We know that there were multiple oral tales of different “returns” (“nostoi” in Greek) from the Trojan war. Each of the Greek heroes who were said to have sailed back from Troy – Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, for example, or Menelaus, husband of Helen – likely had their own return poem. It’s a great tragedy that the Odyssey is the only one of the return epics we have left to us.
We all know, by now, the charm and wit that Fry brings to his myth retellings; and, for many readers, this will be a delightful entry point to the story of the Odyssey, as well as the other return myths. It offers up a palatable and entertaining version of Homer’s epic, sprinkled with the stories of Agamemnon and the House of Atreus. It sparkles with Fry’s trademark light-hearted style and, sure as anything, delivers a ripping good yarn.
The individual heroes are woven with insight and a lightness of touch, while a certain roguishness characterises much of the humour – for example, when Odysseus and his son Telemachus poke their tongues out at each other when they meet. And, as one would expect from the former presenter of QI, there is an abounding delight in exploring etymologies, often in lengthy footnotes (just to give an example: one covers everything from a Greek hero to the genus of albatrosses). The infectious enthusiasm for knowledge is contagious and Fry manages to carry off even a 12-line footnote.
Yet the simplification of the tales – and Fry seems, at times, to be well aware of it – comes at a cost; particularly in a certain bluntness of characterisation, and especially when it comes to women. For instance, in the tale of Agamemnon’s homecoming where he returns to Greece and his wife Clytemnestra kills him in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. In Fry’s retelling Agamemnon is presented very much as the good father who was simply doing his duty by killing his daughter; while Clytemnestra is the bad mother who is glad to have got rid of her children.
Meanwhile, Odysseus’ famous return to Ithaca after 20 years is also portrayed with a twist. In the Odyssey, Odysseus comes home in the guise of a beggar and finds Penelope beset by suitors who believe he has died. Penelope proposes a bow competition, the winner of which will have her hand in marriage. Odysseus wins and takes violent revenge upon the suitors.
In Fry’s retelling this story becomes a romantic fairytale with the hero sweeping in and reducing the thankful wife to her knees, rather than the altogether more complex drama of myth. There is no discomfort at Odysseus’ infidelity. There is no suggestion that Penelope might have worked out that the beggar in disguise was Odysseus. At one particularly uncomfortable moment, Fry makes Odysseus come up with the idea of the contest of the bow (it was absolutely Penelope’s, via Athena). Above all, however, he excises Telemachus’ horrendous hanging of the 12 enslaved women (for the “crime” of being raped by the suitors). Instead, Fry presents these women as “enjoying very special relationships with certain of the suitors”.
Fry’s Odyssey is an entertaining retelling that thrums with Fry’s charming, quick-witted prose. It is, indeed, a tale in search of “a hero”. But the Odyssey is not, in the end, a simple tale of a hero who finds his way home.
To present Odysseus as the ingenious mastermind behind the contest of the bow (not Penelope) and the faithful husband on his return; to present Telemachus as the eager son who doesn’t commit an awful slaughter of raped enslaved women, is to create a certain view of the Odyssey.
It’s a familiar one, to be sure. But it is worth remembering that the Odyssey itself contains other avenues; that it has other – to quote Margaret Atwood who herself re-imagined the story from Penelope and the twelve hanged women’s perspective – “darker alleyways”. I wonder what we are to make of the fact that, in Fry’s Odyssey, some of them are left unexplored.
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Emily Hauser does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.