Book Review: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Bringing a new found family perspective to the story of the greatest Greco-Roman mythology superhero.

When I wrote my review of Stephen Fry’s Troy in 2022, I had imagined it to be an endpoint to a boomlet of books interpreting and reinterpreting Greek mythology from a variety of perspectives. Little did I know that Fry himself has a new book in his series, but more importantly, and germane to this review, John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) would step up to the plate of tackling and interpreting Greek mythology. And, what's more, take the biggest of swings to the most famous hero of Greek mythology in the process.

And so we come to his second novel, Wearing the Lion.

If you are at all familiar with anyone in Greek mythology, you probably know something about Heracles (or, if you want to go Roman, Hercules). Having a TV series devoted to him in the 1990’s certainly helped. His labors come up (even if why he had to do the labors sometimes is fuzzy in the minds of many people). His prodigious strength, certainly is the stuff of legend. He is really is the OG superhero of Classical western literature.

 
And then there is of course the monsters in Heracles' story, where Wiswell comes in.

In many stories of his even before his breakout novel, John Wiswell has been writing and thinking about monsters¹. Monsters are one of his core themes and ideas and exploring monsters, from the inside as well as out, is one of his strongest power chords. And Heracles’ story, let’s face it, is positively littered with monsters. Nearly all of his labors are capturing or killing something monstrous. Probably, the most famous of these is the Nemean Lion, the one whose hide is impenetrable to weapons. How do you defeat a monstrous carnivore you can’t hurt with a spear or a sword? In the main line of the myth, Heracles wrestles it to defeat, uses its own claws and teeth to cut the hide, and then wears it for the rest of his life as some rather good light armor.

 
Wiswell comes up with a rather different idea, and hence the book’s title and the throughline for the book. Why would Heracles, himself a monster in some ways, not seek to befriend monsters rather than to slay them? And what does that do to his myth and story? The Nemean Lion is the first, but far from the only monster that Heracles meets and befriends in the course of the narrative. Heracles is not afraid of a fight, or of war, but this is a Heracles that would rather make a friend. Again, and again. Wearing the Lion is not an act of violence... it is an act of love.

The book alternates point of view between Heracles and Hera. You might be familiar that in most myths, Hera hates Heracles and from birth tries to kill or weaken him². Wiswell plays on the fact that while Hera hates Heracles (for being a bastard son of her philandering husband Zeus), Heracles himself is for most of the book absolutely and positively devoted to “Auntie Hera”. He takes the “Hera’s Glory” of his name (that is what his name means) and hits that theme again and again. This imbalance between a Heracles who is always trying to live up to his divine stepmother and be worthy of her, not knowing she is seeking his downfall, drives a lot of the plot, and some of the more mordant humor of the book. There is the damoclean sword hanging over the narrative--what happens when Heracles finds out what Hera really thinks of him?

 
But the book begins lightly and sprightly enough, in a style that I’ve come to associate with Wiswell’s writing. It almost, I think, strays over to being twee. The conversational tone of the chapters contributes to this, as we often have Heracles, or Hera, talking to (or even more often addressing ) another character in the chapter. The second person point of view gets a workout in this novel and uses it frequently

For all of that rather light tone at the beginning, though, Wiswell is willing to go dark, and in fact to tell his story has to go dark.. I should not have been entirely surprised given his short fiction but there is definitely a gear shift in this book, before and after the death of his children. I had wondered, being relatively familiar with the Heracles story, how Wiswell was going to go there, since he changes a lot of the rest of his labors and background. But indeed, Heracles does in fact kill his three children thanks to a bout of divine madness. What had started as a relatively light Heracles and the monsters story shifts into a more serious and somber tone with less humor and more drama. Heracles of course wants to know why this happened, convinced some god must have done this, and so the rest of his narrative shifts to the quest to find that out.

There is also good work on the theme of identity and who you are. The fact that one of Heracles’ early names Alcides is used again and again, and Heracles reverts to that name when he feels no longer worthy of the name Heracles. This reminds me of Doctor Who’s The War Doctor, stripping himself of the title Doctor, and having in his own mind to re-earn and regain the right to use that name. Lots of Wiswell’s characters at some point have crises or have to come to terms with who they are and their nature. His take on Heracles is another in that spirit and mode.

Meantime, on the other side, Hera has reconsiderations of the fallout of what she has done. A strong beat Wiswell hits again and again is that Hera is Goddess of the Family. Families, especially pregnant mothers but all families in general, are her divine mandate. And instead of killing Heracles with the madness, she wound up killing his family instead³. Coming to terms with all that and what happens next, along with Heracles’ own quests, makes up the back portion of the book. And as Heracles befriends more monsters and completes more quests, the eventual conflict of Hera’s plans and Heracles’ own quest head toward inexorable conflict.

 
So the novel is really in the end about Heracles and his found family of monsters and how they intersect with Hera and her family of gods and goddesses. There is a lot of lovely bits set on Olympus with Hera and the parts of the Olympian pantheon we see--in particular Ares and Athena, although a couple of others come in as well. A criticism I might have for the book is that a few opportunities were definitely missed on this side of the equation, especially with Hera given the divine mandate of motherhood and family being an important theme of the novel. Demeter and Persephone for instance, aren’t even named. The wrangling between the deities we do get and see, however is gold, and their squabbling never gets old⁴. The novel really is, from Hera’s perspective, the slow realization that Heracles’ group of monsters with him are, in fact, a family. Heracles’ story is the slow realization of his own nature, what he did, and coming to terms with himself. And, not to bury the lede, learning to actually accept his family for and what they are.

 
Wearing the Lion shows off John Wiswell’s talents for humanizing and making monsters into people and again, like his first novel, showing that people can often be the real monsters of society. This book doesn’t quite hit that theme as hard as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, this novel though is much more about building and creating a found family...and accepting them and accepting them and their love into you, as much as you loving them. Heracles gets the latter part right off... but he (and Hera) need to learn the first half of that equation matters, too.

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Highlights:

• Interesting take on the Heracles myth exploring his relationship with Hera in a new way
• Strong theme of found family of monsters
• At turns funny, mordant, and without warning, will tear your heart out (a John Wiswell book in other words)

Reference: Wiswell, John, Wearing the Lion, [DAW 2025]

¹Dream conversation at a con or literary event ? Get John Wiswell to talk to Surekha Davies (author of Humans A Monstrous History) about monsters. That’s box office gold. 

²As Fry notes in his books, though, there are a multiplicity of varieties and variants to Greek mythology. Heracles' story is no exception and in fact, he was enormously popular across the Mediterranean. Heracles is actually Hera’s chosen champion in Etruscan mythology and we get none of the “try and kill him” business.

³In this version of the myth, Hercules kills his children but not his wife, who remains loyal to him and important to his redemption. Is that “correct” to the myth? See footnote 2.

⁴Allow me once again to lament the cancellation of KAOS, with Greek Gods set in the Modern Day. 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Review: The Return

A visually stunning retelling of the final chapters of Odysseus' return home to Ithaca that is brutal, quiet, and an exploration of the traumas of war—but it's missing the supernatural

When I heard Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche were going to be in a new retelling of the Odyssey (focusing on just the final chapters following our hero's return back to Ithaca), I was stoked. This marks these two fantastic actors' first film together since 1996's The English Patient.

I'm also a long-time Odyssey stan, having fallen in love with the story upon my first read way back in 10th grade. Since then, I've revisited it over the years, especially the Emily Wilson translation that came out in 2018. And honestly, there hasn't been a good depiction of the story in quite a while. In the '90s, we had Armand Assante playing Odysseus in a TV movie (with a perfectly cast Isabella Rossellini playing the grey-eyed goddess Athena), which while entertaining wasn't quite classic cinema. You could also count 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, though that's more of a loose adaptation updated to the 20th century.

With The Return, we pick up on the story nearly 20 years after Odysseus left his home to take up arms and join his fellow Greeks to fight against the Trojans across the sea. The war itself lasted for a decade, before our wily hero thought up the Trojan horse, which would turn the tide of the battle and end in Troy's destruction. While everyone else headed home, Odysseus spent another 10 years wandering the Greek isles, cursed by the sea god Poseidon.

When he finally makes it to the shore of Ithaca, he's battered, bruised, naked, distraught, and not even sure of where is until Eumaeus, a slave, tells him. This version of Odysseus, however, isn't the resilient hero (at least not yet)—he's a broken man filled with the horrors of war and PTSD.

His family, for whom he has so long fought to make it back to see, has their own issues too. Penelope is cornered by rapacious suitors that demand her hand in marriage while also ruining the island. Telemachus, their son, is man-child angry at both his mother and long-vanished father. Only Penelope, it seems, holds out hope.

For those familiar with the Odyssey (and I can't imagine someone seeing this movie who's not at least a little familiar with the age-old epic), you know the beats and the tropes, but the film takes its time with delivering some of them. With others, you get them ad nauseam. At times, I felt acutely Penelope's frustration as we watched her each evening unravel her shroud work on the loom, the bright red twine coiling away her progress. The camera lingers on many scenes on the island, and it feels at times like you're right there living on the craggy shores of Ithaca.

What this movie is missing, however, is the magic and the gods of the original source. Without Athena's constant guiding hand (and often appearing in disguise), Poseidon's unearthly rage, or Zeus' kingly machinations, the story misses something.

I know that the director chose to do this on purpose, to create a tale about humans and human destruction, but it doesn't exactly work for me. There's a majesty and grandeur to the Greek gods, and dare I say it a level of pettiness and fun that makes the story less about trauma and more about adventure.

Trauma is an important part of the human experience, and to be fair, one that's been overlooked in storytelling for much of history. The rise of A24 has given us many films that expertly explore trauma, and The Return follows the same sort of path. For me, though, it was a bit of a slog to watch, and as I left the theater, I was in a kind of numb place for a few hours. I don't think I saw Odysseus smile once in the entire movie, and the only time he expresses he gratitude for finally making it home, he literally stuffs his mouth with soil.

I'm glad I saw it—Fiennes' portrayal is excellent, and the production design is immaculate—but this one's for only hardcore Homer fans, I'm afraid.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Review: Kaos Season 1

A modern-day reimagining of the ancient Greek gods works spectacularly well in a way that has the the vision of Homer, the aesthetics of Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, and the toxic family dynastic dynamics of Succession. (Spoiler-free)

Sing to me, O muse, of the latest Netflix show, which blew away nearly all of my expectations. Many were the episodes that left me in awe or screaming at the screen.

In 2018, I played Assassin's Creed: Odyssey for a solid six months, and it revived in me an Ancient Greek renaissance. I devoured as much content as I could about my favorite world. I read Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles and Circe, and I bought every second-hand old copy of Greek myths I could find. I even made a hat with Athena's owl on the front. 

So needless to say, I'm a fan of Olympian deities. 

This new series, the brain child of Charlie Covell, sets our favorite gods in modern day Greece, complete with cars, phones, yachts that only Poseidon could afford (and who could also most likely fend off those orcas taking down ships these days). 

I know what you're thinking — another cliched "modern-day retelling" rehash. 

This one's different. It's incredible. 

The characters and their portrayals are truly entrancing and worth watching 

I haven't seen a show so well-cast in years — it's literally a who's-who for TV and movie fans from the past 30 years. In addition to the bigger names I've listed below, there's also a ton of "oh THAT guy!" moments. 

For example: Oh you want the guy who played Stannis Baratheon? Got you. How about Remis Lupin? I'll throw him in along with Frank from Station Eleven.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, is the all-mighty Zeus, and he perfectly captures the insecure, bombastic, and slightly pathetic characteristics of the king of the gods. He's actually playing against type in Kaos, and you don't get the typical "Life, uh, finds a way" moments of Goldblum-ness that usually pop up in his works. 

Janet McTeer is Hera, Zeus' wife and arguably one of the show's most interesting characters — let alone one of the most interesting and powerful portrayals of Hera I've ever witnessed. 

Debi Mazar plays Medusa, everyone's favorite Gorgon. She is so effortlessly cool and intense, and she keeps her snakes under a head scarf to not intimidate people. 

Eddie/Suzy Izzard is one of the three fates — the women in charge of the destiny of every living being. As a fan of Izzard's standup, this was just truly magical to watch.

World-building that rivals the slick and ready feel the John Wick movies

Creating a believable universe for our pantheon of gods to inhabit isn't exactly easy, and even traditional depictions of them have been a bit sparse on the actual domestic details. Yes, Zeus wears a toga and is usually an old white man with gray hair. Mount Olympus, their lofty home, seems more like a big, Grecian-columned room en plein-air more than anything, though. 

Not so with Kaos. Olympus is a sprawling magnificent Italianate villa, even featuring the palace where parts of Naboo from The Phantom Menace were shot. The gods are waited on by dutiful, tennis-attired ball boys. 

Down on Earth, though, there's even more fun stuff. Hera has an entire line of nuns called tacitas that are tongueless (not unlike the avoxes in The Hunger Games) who hear confessions from humans. She can access these confessions right from a room off her bedroom in Olympus, because Hera is a freak.

I could go on and on with the smallest of details — from a box of Spartan Crunch cereal to the fact that Eurydice and Orpheus live in a place called Villa Thrace — because this show is so well done. And if you're a Greek myth nerd, it will definitely demand rewatching. 

Tapping into the emotional truth of mythic characters but straying from actual retellings

Showrunner Covell definitely takes some liberties with the characters and their backstories, but always in service of making things more interesting. For example, Medusa isn't in fact dead, slayed by Perseus, but instead is a middle manager down in the underworld. 

Charon, the lonesome ferryman of the river Styx, was once in love with that fire-stealing upstart Prometheus. This show is so delightfully queer in many ways, and actually features a transman portraying a transman, something Hollywood doesn't always get right. 

So yes, there's lot of little things like this, but I think they truly add to the show rather than take away anything. Covell uses the entire history of Greek myth more like a sandbox, a place in which to grab characters and build them into something interesting and compelling in service of the narrative. It works.

It's got all the big themes that have been making stories entertaining for millenia

The plot revolves around three humans — Ariadne, Orpheus, and Eurydice — and how their fates are intertwined with those of the gods. Zeus has been losing his mind over a prophecy that he believes will have him unseated. There's also familial drama that rivals the Roys in Succession, except that instead of being spoiled and unhinged billionaires, they're literally spoiled and unhinged mighty deities. 

Zeus is still screwing around on Hera, and Dionysus is the prototypical party boy, but it feels a lot more real to modern viewers when it takes place in contemporary Greece. The setting may have changed, but the story hasn't. 

The importance and inevitability of fate is what drives Kaos, though, and it's woven superbly throughout nearly every scene in the season. After the last episode, I literally screamed with pure delight. I cannot wait for the next season. 

Mainly because Athena, my all-time favorite character in Greek myth, wasn't in this season.

I'm telling myself it's because they're going to cast Phoebe Waller-Bridge as her next time. 

Go watch it! 

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The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: I couldn't have imagined a more perfect cast; the soundtrack is superb, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elastica, the Kills, and more; it makes me want to re-dive into my love of Greek myth.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: Seven Against Thebes by Stephen Dando-Collins

Stephen Dando-Collins’ Seven Against Thebes brings the original and once ubiquitously famous story to new audiences and readers

Seven Heroes, coming together to face a tyrant and his forces. You think you’ve heard this story before, or watched it.  Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven. And many variants.  But most of those stories (with one major exception, which I will discuss later) have the Seven coming together in defense, defending a group of innocents against an incoming force.  But the original story of seven heroes coming together is a somewhat different story. A story of a king wrongly deposed by his brother, and managing to gather a force of champions and soldiers to assault the city he once called home and to gain his birthright back. A city that in modern day is not as famous as Athens or Sparta, but was, once, their equal...

This is Stephen Dando-Collins’ story in SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven.

Once upon a time, 2500 years ago, the story of Polynices and his fellow Champions was one of the core stories of Greek History and Myth.  The Iliad and Odyssey you, reader, probably already know. And you know that even beyond those two texts themselves, the stories and myths of the Iliad and Odyssey had been adapted in plays, stories, and other works in Ancient Greece and Rome, and of course, all the way up to today. 

The story of the Seven Against Thebes was, for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the co-equal of the Iliad and Odyssey, once inspired numerous plays and other works based on the events. The Theban Cycle was once as big a deal as anything by Homer. But while the Iliad and Odyssey have proved immortal, the story of the war against Thebes lost its luster and cultural consciousness except for it’s origin point, and the general idea of a band of heroes fighting together (which Kurosawa and Sturges would bring, and flip from offense to defense).  Dando-Collins’ goal here is to bring the original story back to light, for new readers and present a story whose original is perhaps unjustly obscure in a new and modern light.

The author takes a strictly historical fictional tack in the novel right from the beginning of the story. While a lot of the plays and fiction written around these events in the time of the Greeks and Romans had the action replete with Gods and Monsters and the like, Dando-Collins takes a tack that the characters certainly believed in the Gods and act (often very strongly) on their religious beliefs, Zeus, Athena, Hera and the rest of their family do not appear on stage at all.  

So where does the story of Seven Against Thebes begin, in Dando-Collins’ retelling? Well, as I mentioned before, this is the part of the story that you almost certainly know.  Who has not heard of the man who, unknowingly, slew his father and married his mother?  Yes, the start of the story of the war against Thebes begins with none other than Oedipus.  Just why Oedipus did these things are presented in a Historical fictional point of view. While in the original sources, Oedipus was cursed by the Gods to do all this, it is in the end a series of tragic circumstances, and it all begins with a chance encounter on the road. Oedipus, who has been raised far away from his birth home as a foundling, gets into a deadly encounter with his father (not that he had a clue who it was) and proceeds from there to Thebes, the populace unknowing that he killed the King of the city. But they do know he is a big damn hero and so they marry him to the widowed Queen Jocasta, who is indeed his mother, their blood relationship unknown to either at the time.1

I can hear the record scratch. Big Damn Hero? Hero of what? Well, it turns out you may not have realized it, but Oedipus did defeat a monster, or so he claimed was a monster, in a riddling contest.  A monster called the Sphinx. And yes, the classic riddle whose answer is “A Man”.  Again, given the historical fictional perspective, Dando-Collins speculates that the Sphinx was just a woman who was a dangerous robber, nothing more, not that anyone knew that. Defeating the Sphinx is certainly more Heroic than a single female bandit, right?  (Later on, during the actual war, Dando-Collins has a couple of soldiers argue whether the Sphinx was real or was, in fact, just a bandit)

So, Oedipus and Jocasta ruled Thebes for a time, until drought and famine had them seek answers from the Oracle of Delphi as to why and how to solve it.  The results of that led to the two finding out the long buried truth about themselves and what had happened. Oedipus blinds himself and flees Thebes. 1 This leaves Oedipus and Jocasta’s two sons, Polynices and Etoceles. They decide that they should share the throne, ruling in alternate years. In a move that everyone with the sense of a dazed dormouse should have seen coming, the moment Etoceles takes the seat, he banishes his brother. 

And so the Seven Against Thebes gets its defining motivation. Polynices winds up at the court of King Adrastus in the city of Argos.  Along with another royal exile from a different city, Tydeus, he cools his heels for a while, but is always dreaming of the chance to go and wrest control of the city from his no-good brother.  Finally, a plan is hatched by Polynices and Tydeus to get their thrones back, by finding and gathering a group of companions, going together to liberate Thebes, and then go on to liberate Calydon on behalf of Tydeus. (And Adrastus, who would get lots of prestige by having the two cities beholden to him for his help, sees this all as a good investment in money and manpower)

As you can see, Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven and its kin usually have our Heroes defending the weak, training the helpless and playing defense for an incoming force, but the original source text is all about an assault on Thebes. L.R. Lam and Elizabeth’s May SEVEN DEVILS, though, does take inspiration from the original source text, having their heroes go on the offense against an oppressive Empire. And the former Heir to the Empire is one of the Seven, continuing the theme of having someone connected intimately to the ruler as part of the attacking party.  

But there is a note of heroism in fighting against a corrupt space Empire in Seven Devils, that Seven Against Thebes, as told by Dando-Collins, lacks. The reasons why the Seven get recruited and join Polynices’ quest to become King of Thebes are varied but are relatively mercenary--be it in terms of material wealth, or glory. This does have the knock on effect, I think, for a modern reader like me to sympathize with the Seven a little less than I would with a more modern tale. Polynices got a raw deal, to be sure, thanks to his brother, but this is not an altruistic campaign by any means for any of the others. 

When the actual marching and fighting occur, Dando-Collins, who has written on ancient armies and combats, really does shine. He looks at the logistics of marching and the terrain the army has to traverse, and the set pieces of the conflict. He shows a mix of individual combats a la the Iliad with army actions on a larger scale as the forces led by each of the Seven face off against the Seven gates of Thebes. He goes into loving detail on how Thebes was arranged and defended and the heroism on both sides of the conflict (and also side quests!) plays out. It was especially, here, that I could start to see what Classical Greeks and Romans saw in the story. War, reverses, combat, heroism, tragic deaths, pathos, and much more. It’s excitingly and engagingly written. 

Especially good is how the battle plays out. It’s a method much copied in film, because it works.  If you have a group of opponents on each side, you pair them off, so that you narrow the wide screen to a series of one-on-ones. The Seven do this, by each Gate in Thebes getting a defender to hold off the member of the Seven assaulting it.  It will surprise you not at all to find that, for example, thjat the gate Polynices assaults is defended by his brother Etoceles, himself. 

There is also another bit I got to thinking in reading this. If you remember your Iliad, there were funerary games held for Hector after Achilles slew him. Here, in the course of the battles and conflicts, we get a couple of high profile deaths, and funerary games to match.  The sheer joy and exuberance the participants have in the funerary game make it clear to me that this is how the Ancient Greek Olympics must have surely started--it started out of funerary games that eventually decided to become a regular thing, without needing a funeral to have an excuse to hold them. 

The other takeaway is when this book takes place in the timeline of Greek history/myth. Given that several of the children and immediate descendants of the Seven are present at Troy, this takes place in the generation before the Trojan War.  Theseus is contemporary to the Seven. One of the Seven is the son of Atalanta, the Huntress of the Calydonian Boar. If we mix myth and history for a moment, the Seven are the penultimate crop of heroes in Greek Mythology. After them, we get the Trojan War and the end of Mythic, Heroic Greece. Mythic Greece fades away into real history.2  Perhaps since they are the second closest to real history and also are less myth-touched than earlier generations of heroes like Heracles, Bellerophon, and the like, the Seven were and are more relatable as real people by readers and storytellers alike. 

If you are looking for a mythic, magic, here, this is not the rendition of the story that you want. Dando-Collins is relentlessly materialistic, attributing everything to men or to chance, and the Gods and magic play no part in his story. He fashions this mythic story into historical fiction of the first order, readable, immersive and a great look at larger than life characters and their epic and immense struggle.  This is source material and inspiration that more authors could mine for their own ideas. 

And if you want to learn more about Thebes, the city that was neither Athens nor Sparta but just as important, back in the day, let me commend to you Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, by Paul Cartledge. He does briefly touch on the Theban cycle events before going on to written history of the city.

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Highlights: 

• Epic storytelling grounded in the real.
• A real spotlight on a story whose details have faded from public consciousness

1. This is too big a digression to avoid putting elsewhere than a footnote, so here goes. The Oedipal complex has nothing to do really with Oedipus. He had no idea he killed his father, and married his mother. And as I said in the main text, once he and she find out the truth, it is with horror, revulsion and repulsion that this truth comes out, not any sort of secret desire like in Freud. Oedipus’ story is of tragedy of circumstance, not any sort of lusting after one’s parent. 

2. And yes I am sort of thinking of Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, here. 

Dando-Collins, Stephen, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven. (Turner, 2023)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review [Video Game]: Stray Gods

 A decision based story game with a musical twist, and one that manages to charm, despite its shortness.

The first game from new studio Summerfall Studio, co-founded by David Gaider of BioWare fame, Stray Gods is a narrative/choice-based game with a musical twist. You play as Grace, newly-made Muse, as she is pulled into the world of the Greek gods living in secret in her city, and attempts to solve a murder in the one week she's given before the trial that will accuse her of it. It's a short game, heavily focussed on the characters and their interactions and choices, rather than anything approaching an RPG (despite the "roleplaying" in its tagline). Its key distinguishing feature however - and the other part of the tagline - does not mislead. It absolutely is a musical.

Grace's power, she soon discovers, is that she can cause the people around her to burst into song and reveal what's going on in their minds and hearts... and possibly nudge it in the direction she wants it to go. She uses this power to help her solve the murder, as she meets new people who have no reason to tell her the truth about anything, and needs to get them to spill their souls as soon as possible (guitar riffs optional).

Which, frankly, is more justification than you get for the songs in most musicals, so it was nice to get that actual tie in for the premise. But I'll come back to the music in a moment.

In terms of gameplay, it's a pretty short story-based murder mystery plot - probably around 10 hours of gametime in total, if that - I burned through it in only a couple of sessions. That being said, it doesn't feel insubstantial, for all the brevity. The game is divided into three acts, and further into obvious episodes/chapters of events, and each smaller part feels like it pulls its weight in terms of furthering the story or giving you more information about the world or the characters - there's not a lot to it but it squeezes as much as it can out of those parts, and leaves it feeling greater than the sum. I definitely didn't feel shortchanged for my purchasing it.

It's also extremely replayable - at the beginning of the game, you choose a dominant personality trait (charming, badass or clever), and you can choose to follow the conversation choices this leads you to through the story, giving you three different moods to your gameplay, which mostly lead you to similar places, but with very different levels of information, as well as extremely different tones, to take you through the story. I followed mostly blue on my first play, and seeing the information subsequently available on a red play gave me quite a lot of background info that I'd just not had access to, as well as substantially different endings for some of the characters. But you don't have to - it's also possible to mix and match, to find the route through that sits better with how you want to play. But there's a benefit to consistency - which again, we'll come back to when we discuss the music.

There are also four potential romance options, and while they do each tend to synthesise better with one of the personality traits (Persephone is generally found with the badass conversation options), you don't have to bend to that. You have flexibility to pick the route you want, with the person you want, except for a few very specific choices, and those choices are pretty clearly marked out - if you want to romance Apollo, you probably need to take him along to help you through the events of the story, for instance.

The romances are all pretty different in terms of their personalities - you have an angry, vengeful Persephone, who is frankly one of the best iterations of the figure that I've seen in any recent media, a slightly skeevy, mischievous and cunning but also incredibly smooth Pan, your entirely unsubtly pining long-time best friend and all round myth-nerd Freddie, and the saddest boy in the world, Apollo. Who you choose to romance will also affect what information you get, both about the murder and about the world and characters around you, though it doesn't have an enormous impact in terms of what individual scenes you get and the conversations you have, so you don't ever really feel like your romance choice has cut you off from things you might have wanted to know.

No he does not appear to know how to button up a shirt

But you might feel cut off from the music - because each romance option has their own unique song sung with the protagonist, and a reprise at the end of the story if relevant. And it's here that I think there's a lot of the compelling content for each of the threads - the music for the romances is completely different, and sets a lot of the tone for that character's motivations, their feelings and how they relate to your protagonist. Where Apollo's is a much-needed jolt of optimism to chase away his melancholy, Persephone's is far more confrontational and teasing. Who you choose will have an impact - a big one - on the music you get at a few of the key scenes.

But then, so do all your choices. The personality traits aren't just about how you approach conversations in the game - they're also how you approach songs, and form the core of what's so interesting and unique about this game. They each correspond to a broad musical style, and if you want a consistent album of music at the end of it, you want to keep picking your chosen colour and stick with it - broadly speaking, green tends to the melodic and emotional, red to the rock and the beat, and blue to a strangely jaunty selection of songs. And so even at points in the game where you're accessing broadly the same content, by making those choices, it sounds totally different - not just the tune, but the lyrics and sometimes the graphics change to suit the mood of the music.

So if you replay it, you've essentially got three variables to mess around with, to make a whole new piece of media around your story, and that's before you start making a truly individualised medley. Summerfall have, very sensibly, made all three colours available as an individual album, as well as a purple version with the instrumental and less changeable songs, so if you want to spend several hours comparing them and crafting your perfect experience, you very much can.

Is it worth doing that? Well, mostly. There are some absolute banger songs in the game, especially at some of the key dramatic moments - the opening song Adrift is hauntingly beautiful, no matter which route you end up choosing. However, if you're not a particular fan of the type of musical show where the dialogue devolves into speak-singing at every turn, some of the tracks will turn you off completely. There's also something of a mixed bag of vocal abilities amongst the cast. I have absolutely no concerns about Anthony Rapp's voice - frankly, he needed more singing time - but Felicia Day is, while an excellent voice actor, certainly not the strongest voice in the chorus, so to speak. Especially when the voice acting is generally such a strong part of the production - and it really is, there are some very well played dramatic moments, and one character who occasionally gave me chills when they spoke - it feels a shame that the singing just sometimes lets the whole thing down. And this is all coming from someone with... mixed abilities at musical appreciation at best. I suspect someone with a good ear and a lot of musical experience might find more to criticise in the singing.

Erika Ishii's Hermes is an adorable little dork

Likewise, there are some other audio mishaps. Chief among them, the volume is incredibly inconsistent. You might be set perfectly for a song, and then you break for dialogue and suddenly it feels like Pan is shouting at you, then you turn around and he's whispering. It breaks the flow and immersion somewhat to be constantly fiddling with the settings to try to get it right. There are also occasional moments where the audio and subtitles just aren't well aligned.

But... it's easy to forgive these sins, if you're sold on the heart of the story, and especially the characters, as I was. Even the ones who don't get a lot of screentime, like Hermes and Eros, are well done, and their voice actors have put a lot into making them instantly individual, putting what little gametime they have to the fullest use possible. 

Meanwhile Abubakar Salim's Eros is both second saddest boy in the world and an absolute sweetheart

The game keeps the cast pretty small, so you can get as much time with the key characters as possible, and while it sometimes makes "crowd" scenes feel sparsely populated, it was a good choice for the length of game we have.

It also helps that the writers have definitely treated the mythological origins of the story more as a jumping off point than an unchangeable gospel. As well as the badass Persephone we need and deserve, they've definitely been willing to play around with the backstories of some of the other characters as needed to suit the game they're trying to make... all while still giving us occasional flashes of clearly quite in-depth research behind the scenes. This flexibility also carries through in their interpretation of the powers they've given their gods, and gives us a more seamlessly modern looking cast while sidestepping any discussions that might have - in however much good or bad faith - about the "authenticity" to history of their looks. And in playing flexibly with the source material, they give us a finished product that feels far more urban fantasy than anything else, just one with a Greek mythology flavouring.

Compared to the more interesting parts of story and song, the art direction is a much more minimalistic one - the cartoonish style is simple and fades into the background, while being well done at every step. Especially in character design, it really does its job, but the animation is basic, letting you focus instead on the song and story. Everyone is instantly recognisable, but their individuality comes in the base design, rather than in how they move and interact - the game revolves primarily around still shots, rather than dynamic scenes, letting the singing do the talking instead.

All in all, it's a competently built short game, tightly focussed around the innovative musical idea at its core. There are some issues with the execution, especially for those more likely to be turned off by occasionally iffy musical moments, but if you're willing to buy into the story and the heart of the game, it becomes easy to forgive the missteps. And they've fundamentally made a game where it's easy to do just that. In a perfect world, it might be longer, more substantial, more expansive. But what we have is a replayable, relistenable delight, that will leave you humming tunes for days after you've finished playing.

--

The Math

Highlights: Genuinely innovative core concept, cute art, high replayability

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Stray Gods [Summerfall Games, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview[Novella]: Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

 An attempt to take the story of Antigone and reinvent it in a dystopian future that fails to understand the core appeal of the original story.

Arch-Conspirator tells the story of Antigone, a play written in the 5th century BCE by Sophocles, an Athenian tragedian, as the third of his Theban plays. It follows on from Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus, in the latter of which Oedipus has died and his daughters are returning to their home in Thebes, only after reassurance from Theseus that their father has received the appropriate burial rites. Which leads us into the key drama of Antigone - her brothers are dead, and she wishes to ensure that Polynices receives a respectable burial, just as Eteocles already has, and against the wishes of the men in power. It is a play about how some duties, some actions, weigh more heavily than simple laws, and the lengths to which we should go, in the face of overwhelming opposition, to do right. But it is also about how two people can have entirely different senses of justice, and for a large portion in the early part of the play, Kreon, Antigone's antagonist, has just as much reason to believe he has right on his side as she does. It is only once a revelation is provided that the gods concur with Antigone that he strays from righteous action (however lacking in mercy or compassion) into tyranny, and everything falls apart. Part of its enduring popularity - it is constantly restaged to this day - is that the themes are ones which really transcend the setting and can be endlessly reapplied to different contexts without losing their impact or emotional resonance.

And so, enter Veronica Roth, who has taken this play, and turned it into a novella set in a dystopian future. It's a world that has been wracked by unspecified horrors that have left much of it an irradiated wasteland. In this world, birth rates are waning, and so women are valued, protected and stifled because of their precious ability to bear children - they are reduced to walking wombs. It is also a harsh autocracy, with Kreon at the top controlling the city, and one in which, at death, everyone's gametes are gathered by a weird gizmo to be stored in an enduring catalogue of genes for... reasons. It's something that happens to all of the dead, regardless of their actions in life, and is a fundamental of their society.

As I imagine you can already see, we have the key ingredients here for a pretty faithful reimagining of the Greek setting - you have a single, oppressed, female figure standing alone in support of a core tenet of their society in the face of a tyrannical leader. Easy peasy, right?

And yet, Roth manages to get it so, so wrong.

Somehow, this manages to be both an incredibly beat for beat retelling of Antigone's story - to the extent that it will bore people who like their myths more... reimagined - and also full of weird little changes that will annoy anyone who just wants this story told as is. But more than that, it gives us nearly all of the plot beats of the original, but without any of the necessary connective tissue to hold it together and to really sell the emotion that is so fundamental to this story.

Some of this is because it is, quite simply, too short. I rarely think books ought to be in a different format than they are, but this absolutely needed to be a novel, not a novella. It feels rushed at every point, and especially at the end, and what has most been gutted out of it is the work that might have gone into developing the characters. Which is sorely needed.

As it stands, the characters have no chemistry, and barely any personality. They are reduced to their simplest iterations, with none of the nuance that could make them so fascinating to watch. Kreon, for example, is simply a man with too much power, using it wrongly. And while this is certainly part of his personality in the original text, it's not nearly all of it. His core problem is that he starts off with a... if not reasonable, then understandable point of view. He's punishing a traitor, in the hope of dissuading future dissent and finally getting some damn peace in his city. His abiding sin is that he cannot turn from his path, even when he is reliably informed that the gods are very much not on his side - he, and by extension, his city and those around him, suffer because of his hubris. I mean, it's a Greek tragedy, after all. But Roth's Kreon has none of this - he is simply a bad man who has power over a lot of people, using it badly. Frankly, you struggle to see how he got into this position at all. The man has no sense, no reason, and a total black hole where charisma might be, especially after his perspective chapter which has some of the dullest prose you may ever see.

Other characters are similarly poor - you get almost nothing of Ismene, except when needed for the plot to counter Antigone, and because she's had none of the buildup, her filling that role makes almost no sense. Likewise, Haemon, Kreon's son and Antigone's betrothed, barely turns up until suddenly, he's incredibly import, and everything just escalates wildly.

Which is another issue with the story - the pacing is all over the place. There never seems to be any buildup to what happens, the story just throws events up here and there, sometimes to the point where I found myself flipping back a few pages to figure out - did that really just happen? Where did that come from? Roth somehow manages to neither show, nor tell, only vaguely reference after the fact.

And so, when you get to some of the critical moments, they lack the emotional weight they ought to bear because we're just not ready for them. Antigone, in her original play, gets an absolutely glorious speech before Kreon and the people of the city, and absolute crowd-pleaser and a joy to listen to... and while she does get a speech in the novella it's somewhat stilted, abbreviated and above all, just not very good. You don't come out of it believing that anyone will have been made to think by it, and it's over before it can really sink its teeth into anything significant. It just feels there because, to be an Antigone retelling, she needs a speech and well, here you go. Tick that off the list.

But that trial is played to be a major pivot point in the plot - as it is in the play - and so you find yourself at odds with the story's own perception of itself as you read it, especially if you're familiar with the plot its harking back to.

And this is possibly the core of my problem with this story. Myth retellings, or reimaginings, necessarily exist in conversation with their original. They have to choose how they present that conversation to the reader - is it a reliable narration or not, is it a distant reimagining, told and retold and changed in the telling? But there's always that kernel of the original at the core, and for me, good retellings preserve a strand of the spirit of the original, or a reflection on what that original could have been or meant, even as they change potentially an enormous amount around it. But Roth... isn't in conversation with Antigone. Or if she is, she's not doing much talking. Instead, we get... essentially the SparkNotes of the story with a bit of SF flavour around the edges.

And maybe that would be fine, or good enough, if the SF flavour had been well-developed or interesting or novel, but it's not. Like much about this story, it could have very much done with some extra fleshing out, not so much in the facts and details, but in the emotionality of it, the context, the grounding of what's going on. We know the facts - we know about gendered oppression and the hardship of the world, the riots and the radiation - but we don't know how this is part of the texture of that world. Everything exists to serve its purpose to the strict centre of the story, and anything that might be flavour or atmosphere or simply there to bed us into things has been stripped out. So, again, it felt far, far too short. It's a rare book that could stand a few more heavy-handed paragraphs of exposition by a side character, but this is perhaps one of them. When this is your core - and nearly your only - point of difference with the myth you're retelling, surely then you need to make this the star of the show? Yes, it's exactly the Antigone you know, but hey, it's in a dystopian wasteland, so let's see how that affects things! And it's not. 

I say "nearly" only - there are a few deviations from the original plot, but they are few, mostly at the end, and seem not to serve anything but muddling any themes the story felt like it had. The tragedic elements are undermined, the pathos cut short, some of the characters robbed of their potential emotive force, and you're left wondering - what did I get out of this?

Or indeed, why was this written at all?

Which is always the problem with retellings - what does this bring to the story that we can't get from the original? Maybe the answer is "it's now a really compelling novel instead of a really compelling play". Maybe the answer is "putting it in space changes EVERYTHING" or "it's being used as a way of highlighting some very modern problems" or "finding a resonance with something that you might not have considered". There are lots of ways retellings can be done that say something fun or interesting or meaningful. At the moment, the one being chosen is mostly "but make it feminist" which is, y'know, fine. But when you take a play like Antigone, which I would argue is about as feminist as many of the modern ones, whose idea of feminism seems to be "give it a female protagonist", already... you need something better than that. It needs to be good, or interesting, or insightful, and Arch-Conspirator is none of those things.

And so it's a disappointment of a book, when it could have been at least moderately interesting. The critical sell of Antigone as a play is that Antigone is a complex figure who gets some absolutely banging speeches and appeals to very fundamental ideas of morality and duty and the debts we owe one another even into death that are more core than law, they're religion and just being human. She may not be likeable, but you have to respect that she is both brave and probably right, as well as being in just a really horrible situation. If you make the fundamental ideas that she's arguing about a bit less graspable, you risk losing the sympathy, and then if you don't develop her personality, you lose the sympathy the audience might give her, and if you then don't give her banging speeches, what even is her point? Roth has made Antigone drab, and denuded it of the meaning it already had, let alone reinvigorate it with any new ones.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 4/10

Bonuses: 

Penalties: -1 for complete absence of gutpunch speeches

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10

Reference: Veronica Roth, Arch-Conspirator [Titan Books Ltd, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview[Comic]: Wonder Woman Historia Book 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Phil Jimenez

 A retelling of the birth of DC's Amazons, centring their perspective, and giving a view into the world of the gods.

I am not up to date on Wonder Woman in the DC comics universe more broadly. This is a review coming from a place of enjoying her in film and in the abstract, rather than a detailed understanding of her place in DC lore. With that said, Wonder Woman is one of my favourite superheroes, and one with a backstory I find neat and interesting, so when I saw that there was going to be a more or less standalone comic series on the depths of that backstory, one where I wouldn't need to try to find out exactly what lore I did and did not need to know in advance, and that it was going to be written by Kelly Sue DeConnick no less, I was absolutely there for it.

Wonder Woman Historia tells the history of the Amazons, right from not only their creation by the gods - or rather, the goddesses - but from the causes that led to that creation. It details their division into tribes, their attributes and personalities, and it details the anger that drove the goddesses to create them, their despair of the world of men and their treatment of women, their argument with the gods over this, Zeus's dismissal... and what they did in the aftermath.

Volume 1 is primarily concerned with beginnings, with the exact why and how and the different threads that led to it, it's an introduction more than a strong driving narrative. So you might think that would make it a weaker read, being as it is more of a piece of lore than a story. And yet... it works. There's a both a palpable emotion to it, especially in the way the goddesses are talked down to by a Zeus so comfortable in his power and his justice that he feels no need for diplomacy, and the way the male gods are arrayed behind him, leering with his pronouncements, but also a palpable strangeness. These gods are not just humans writ large - these are gods as the otherworldly, gods as the embodiments of strange forces. Athena is an empty shell, masked and armoured. Hecate is thorn-covered, multi-headed, more like a spider than a person. These are the gods as inhuman, in form and feeling, in how they see the world, conduct themselves. And between the strangeness and the sharp emotional resonance, it manages to be just as compelling as a more story or character driven narrative might be.

That being said, for all the comic does a great job of recognising some of the terribleness of the ancient world instead of lauding it uncritically, it is only concerned with that single axis. We see the problems faced by women, and pretty much only by women. Even when slavery is mentioned (briefly), it is as another angle of men's power over women, which ignores that slavery in the ancient world was vaster and more destructive than that one vector of oppression.

This monofocus bleeds up into the conflict at the god level - it is a story so fundamentally about women and their oppression by men, that there is little space in it for other problems, at least in this volume. Which has a strange effect in the immortal conflict of bringing together a group of goddesses who, in many of the myths, have very conflicting aims and allegiances. They, for the most part, operate as a unified front of feminism, rather than a fractured group of people who may align on this one issue, but may equally not on whatever fate throws their way tomorrow. If one wanted to be a traditionalist about it, this jars somewhat with a lot of the mythology, and beyond emphasising how bad the ancient world is for women, the comic does little to justify the changes it makes. But because it is very much focussed on the birth of the Amazons, and their existence as a force for the defence of women, this unity makes sense for the endpoint, if not the start, and so at least for me was relatively easy to overlook.

The more interesting "change" is the shift in focus on Hera - in many modern iterations, her role as the goddess of marriage, and perhaps motherhood or childbirth, is the one emphasised, and especially contrasted to her philandering husband. Wonder Woman Historia chooses instead to focus on her role as the goddess of women - it goes straight in with that in her introduction. It also gives her the gift of perfect prophecy, setting her apart from the other goddesses not just in rank but in how she views the world - she can see everything, past, present and future, all at once, and so knows how their endeavour will unfold, even as it begins. But more critically than all of that, she is not cast as a jealous wife or a bitter enemy here, as she is in so many other stories - she is a protector of women. Her role is a less active one than her fellow goddesses, but she makes her feelings no less plain in their dealings with the gods. In a time when we have so many myth retellings, with so many rehabilitations of gods who may have been overlooked in stories previously, it is rare to see Hera getting the same treatment, and for me, a welcome innovation.

The other key point of the volume is not a story one - it is simply that the art is utterly gorgeous. Reminiscent of Christian Ward's psychedelic depictions of the gods in Ody-C, Phil Jiminez's art is sumptuous and, when depicting the gods, gorgeously strange. The use of intense colour, excessive detail and more fluid and flexible page structuring heavily emphasises their inhumanity, and is by far one of the resounding triumphs of the series. And it is not only here we see that shine.

The art tells a story - a continuity of strangeness from the mundane, subdued palette and more normally spaced and structured world of humanity, up to the overwhelming saturation and complexity of the gods, with the Amazons sitting at a midpoint, with deeper, richer colours and more vibrant detail, but a paler shadow of their patron gods. They are human... but also more than human, and the art cues us to this before the story has the chance to spell it out - the two work hand in hand to build a deeper, richer world than one alone could accomplish.

And to some extent, it is for the art, more than for anything else, that Wonder Woman Historia is worth reading. The story is compelling, the lore interesting, the structure unusual and the emotions absolutely there on the page, but it is the art and its use in the world-building, and just as an aesthetic experience, that really sells this. For most stories, I find what lingers with me is a character moment, or possibly a well constructed phrase. For this, it is the vision of Hera, armed and armoured and surrounded by birds, unearthly and inhuman in her gaze, that stands strong in the memory. However good the story, it pales before the insistent presence of the art that overwhelms it.

Which leaves this a somewhat mixed review. For me - the sumptuousness of the art was sufficient, and beautifully scaffolded an already excellent story. But it could just as easily distract, and become the main focus, and for someone who wants a story that is more pacy, more driven and more narratively focussed, the need to linger on some pages, to figure out what goes where and who is who, definitely brings down the speed reading. There is simply too much on some pages to hurry. And if you want the story but to ignore the art, the experience here will be actively detrimental - the two are so necessarily entwined that you can't fully enjoy the one while sidelining the other.

But if you want to spend time luxuriating in it, and if this art style works for you? Then it's absolutely fantastic.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +2 gorgeous art that reflects the world-building

Penalties: -1 monofocus on oppression of women sometimes seems to conspicuously ignore other problems within the world

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference:  Kelly Sue DeConnick and Phil Jimenez, Wonder Woman Historia Book One [DC, 2021]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview [book]: Troy, by Stephen Fry

Sing, Muse of the Retelling of the story of Troy, as told by the bard Stephen Fry.

The first two volumes of the Mythos project by Stephen Fry looked at the foundational myths of Greek Myths, from creation all the way through the Olympians, through the elder cycle of heroes and demigods, and then to the succeeding generations of demigods and heroes. It’s a complicated nest of relationships, characters, and events that still puts things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe to shame, and Fry ably brings it all together, if anyone can, in the previous two books.

Now in Troy, Stephen Fry caps it off by looking at the Trojan War. 

The Trojan War, standalone, is eternally popular, with even an early Doctor Who episode taking a crack at it, as does Shakespeare. It was odd to me when I first read the Iliad, though that we have a war that lasts 10 years, the Iliad only covers a short period in the ninth year of the war. Where was the Trojan Horse that I had heard about before ever reading the Iliad, so infused as it is in our cultural DNA? Why doesn’t Troy fall at the end of the Iliad? I later (when I read The Odyssey) saw that the ending of the War is contained there. And while I knew the Golden Apple story and the abduction (or flight) of Helen with Paris, what happened in years 1-8 of the Trojan War was and has been vague and not well defined.  Perhaps this is the same for you, reader. 

And all of these names and people to keep straight. I’ve heard the Iliad and the Odyssey described as the OG Sword and Sorcery and Epic Fantasy books, and there is a point to that. We’re dropped into the middle of things, with names and characters being thrown at you and an entire book in the Iliad (The Catalogue of Ships)  being basically a list of the “who’s who” at the battle. 

In any event, Fry is here to help you. He starts at the beginning, as to how Troy was founded, and why, and brings its history up to date as it were. The delight in the depth of research and scholarship he brings is tha there is a fair chunk here I didn’t know about. Fun fact, the Trojan War is not the first time that Troy gets attacked in its mythological history, and you will never guess who did it before the Greeks got it into their heads to take back Helen, nor why. 

Once we get to the story of Paris, I was on fully fleshed ground and I highly enjoyed Fry’s interpretation of his abandonment on Mount Ida, his being raised as a shepherd, the fateful judgment of Paris (giving the apple to Aphrodite) and on through into the War itself. Fry does not do the Catalogue in full but he does lay out the combatants, the names you do want to pay attention to and remember. When and where they are important to the narrative, and who they are to each other. Like the American Civil War, there are tangled distant family and friendships and acquaintances on both sides of the battle. And frequently (especially among the Greeks, and indeed, the inciting incident of the Iliad), the people on each side are at odds with each other. Long before there was Tony and Steve in the MCU, there was Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, Menelaus, Ajax, and others. 

There are many versions of the Iliad, and people have their favorites. Fry is not trying to be Robert Fitzgerald, or Lattimore, or Fagles, or Caroline Alexander. He doesn’t recite the Iliad, but tells its story in prose, in his own way. All the details are here, though, the pathos and the wonder, the terrible slaughter. He looks at the book with the eye of someone who loves and respects the story but can also see it’s faults. There is a fascinating bit where Fry metatextualizes a portion of the Iliad that, unbeknownst to me, he reveals that scholars think is a late addition, as it stylistically and otherwise does not match up with the rest of the poem. 

Another portion of the book that greatly interested me especially is after the death of Hector, and up to its fall. What had always been a little hazy for me is why Troy didn’t capitulate after their best hero, Hector, falls. In chess terms, they’ve just lost their queen, and are down material, and white is pushing hard against them.  Fry tells the story of the reinforcements Troy gets, which does not change the outcome, but it does stave it off, and it buys Troy time for Paris to land his fateful shot on Achilles’ heel (or was it with the help of Apollo?). Also some of the other events leading up to the Horse were new to me (Helen’s complete disenchantment with Paris, and Paris’ death, and the Greeks nearly getting Troy to crack before the Horse itself). The fact that Helen remarries was completely a “what?” moment for me. 

Another thing that struck me about this book as compared to the previous two is the lack of variations and the need to tell about alternatives to the main line of the myths and stories. Early on in the book, when the book discusses the founding of Troy, there are a few bits here and there, but in the main, the narrative of the who, and the what, and the why of the events of the Trojan War are much less braided and multivalent than in Mythos and Heroes. This is not particularly a fault, mind, but after two books where we get a host of alternatives to the stories of Zeus, Athena, Atalanta, Jason and Heracles, there is a much more unified picture as to what happened on the plains of Ida, what happened to the topless towers of Ilium. This is of course because our sources for the Trojan War and the stories of what happened at Troy once Paris and Helen arrive there come from Homer and sources that agree with Homer. 

I do think that while there are certainly a few more “stories” to tell of the Greek Myths, the Trojan War, the events at Troy are the last hurrah, the last great gathering of Gods and Heroes on both sides. To use a Norse reference, in a way, Troy is a Götterdämmerung, and we are left with a world where the heroes and the Gods themselves fade away, leaving a world of mortal men, and just the stories of what happened in these three books. 

In a real sense, then, when Eris threw her golden apple into that fateful marriage party, she had, in effect, doomed herself and all the Gods, with the Trojan War to be their final hurrah, their last battlefield. This gives the whole book a sense of tragedy, of foreboding that this is going to be the end, and it better had be a blockbuster smash. One last party, one last gathering.  Fry prefigures this idea with the marriage party of Peleus and Thetis, he states it is the “last great gathering” of these beings, and he is right. There is an almost faerie-like feel of diminishment in that, that the world is going to turn from the age of gold and silver and bronze to hard, cold, iron. (rather appropriate, in that the Trojan War might be thought of as the last hurrah of the Bronze Age)

And in that, Stephen Fry has completed very ably the project he began with Mythos. I do think that although the books are footnoted, always a hazard for listening to books, the sheer enthusiasm, love, respect, and intense fascination Fry has for these stories really comes through on the audio renditions. Like Homer himself, these stories here, of Paris’ choice, of the Rage of Achilles, of the Tragedy of Hector, the cleverness of Odysseus, are in the end well received in one’s ears, just as well as reading them in print. 

With people like Fry reading and reinterpreting and retransmitting the stories of the Greek Myths, I do hope, and I think, that these stories will find new readers, new transmitters, and new interpreters. While Fry does a fairly good job in providing a balanced and enlightened and nuanced viewpoint to these stories, another thing that struck me as I was listening to Troy (and indeed all of Mythos) is how much room there still is and is for readers and writers who are not of different backgrounds to take these stories and reinterpret, reinvent, and reuse them. 

Troy is the capstone of a whole cycle of Greek myths and stories that writers like Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing), Madeline Miller (Song of Achilles), Natalie Haynes (A Thousand Ships) and others are picking up the banner and running with their own ideas and interpretations for. Fry provides a modern “baseline” for writers such as these to rediscover these stories, and then go on and tell and make them their own, providing ever new interpretations and (keeping in mind what I said before) new variations, too. That is my hope: With this work to introduce readers to these stories and myths in an accessible way, more people will want to take them and make them their own. I still dream of a Greek Mythology Cinematic Universe, but that is probably just a dream.

And with that, this review, as well as the Trojan War comes to a close. I'd humbly suggest that Fry tackle the (sadly) much poorer and thinner canon we have of Norse Mythology yet, but we HAVE that book already, ably written (and narrated) by Neil Gaiman. Readers who want more mythology ably written and imagined as in these three books might turn to that volume, next.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.