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Stephen Fry's ‘Odyssey’: The appeal of epics, legends and myths
Summary
In the hands of great raconteurs like Stephen Fry, the retelling of classical stories turns into a form of its own
Retelling myths and epics for contemporary readers is one of the easiest and, if you are lucky, most lucrative route to a writing career. The stories remain omnipotent, thousands of years after their origins, always ready to be adapted into new-age fantasies or revisited from fresh perspectives. Think of the proliferation of titles inspired by the Hindu pantheon that overrun Indian bookstores, or the ever-expanding universe of genre fiction, anime, comic books and graphic novels drawing on the vast constellation of Norse, Viking and Anglo-Saxon legends and folklore.
In the hands of great raconteurs, the retelling of classical stories turns into a form of its own, as is evident from Odyssey, the final volume of Stephen Fry’s four-book series on Greek legends, which came out recently.
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To be fair, the title is a bit misleading. The book isn’t a full, or even a faithful, account of Homer’s great epic. While the years-long homecoming journey of the eponymous hero of the Trojan War is central to Fry’s design, other tales of return—not necessarily with happy endings—flow into the narrative like tributaries into a sea of stories. From Agamemnon’s murder by his aggrieved queen Clytemnestra, to Menelaus and Helen’s arduous journey back to Sparta to, Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido to found his own kingdom—the idea of homecoming isn’t just laced with nostalgia in this version.
Fry takes some questionable liberties with characterisation as well. As Odysseus reclaims his kingdom from the suitors hankering after Penelope’s hand, his son Telemachus is overjoyed to have his parents reunited. Unlike the original ending, he doesn’t sully his princely reputation by hanging the 12 enslaved women who had been defiled by the uncouth hangers-on at the court. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005) took this bloody ending as its basis to revisit the story of Odysseus from Penelope’s perspective. In an even more surprising turn, Fry makes Odysseus come up with the bow competition in the end, instead of Penelope, diminishing her role further.
Even as scholars dissect these departures from the original and argue over the politics of Fry’s decisions, it is worth going back to a fundamental question: Why does the appeal of epics, legends and myths refuse to dim with time, especially for people who are already familiar with the content of these stories? When an adult picks up a work of fiction based on a tale they know all too well, is their impulse all that different, cognitively, from that of a child, who begs its parents to put on The Lion King for the 17th time? What does our attraction to these ancient stories say about who we are?
In a world full of uncertainties, there’s comfort in knowing how things are going to unfold. Even keener is the pleasure of discovering strains of the new amidst that which is familiar. This joy of recovering home truths, or stumbling upon meanings that had previously eluded us, in beloved classics contributes to their persistence.
There is, for instance, a palpable tension between mortals and gods all through Odyssey. The two entities are pitted against each other repeatedly. The gods are irresistibly attracted to the mortals, their unions, often non-consensual, spawn demigods galore, who, then, are not allowed to enjoy the privileges of divinity. No matter how beloved some humans remain of certain deities, they are, at the end of the day, mere playthings in the hands of higher powers. As Odysseus puts it, “There are no heroes in this tale. Only men and women. And gods…always gods."
In a secular context, the sentiment may recall the inherently unequal structure of society, where, much like the laws of cosmos, the weak are acted upon by the strong, who create and break rules according to their whims. In a rare moment in Fry’s Odyssey, when Princess Erigone, the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, addresses the judges trying Orestes for matricide, she wishes for a world where the scales are more evenly balanced and common people are empowered to deliver justice. “We mortals can achieve justice and obey the law in our own way without the capricious and brutal intervention of the gods," as she says.
In her succinct and hard-hitting statement, Erigone captures the Greek world’s shift from an ethos of fear of retribution to a human-centric society, ruled by the laws of democracy—“from a time of divine covenant to a time of human treaties and contracts", Fry writes. These transitions establish the conditions for an elect group of humans to take charge over the rest. An ethos of vengeance, where conflicts were settled primarily through blood feuds, gives way to a judicial framework of dispensing fairness in the world. But the latter, too, suffers from its limitations.
As Fry reminds us, the legacy of the Greeks, enshrined in their great philosophical and political treaties, needs to be tempered with more than a generous pinch of salt. “We should remember too that Socrates, the freest and most open philosopher of the great Athenian age, was put to death by the state for asebeia," he writes, “blasphemy, impiety, corrupting young minds by teaching against the accepted norms of religion."
The parallels of the ancient world with the one we have inherited, several thousands years later, remain ironic. Here’s Fry, once again: “We too live in a society where certain pieties cannot be questioned without the danger of social annulment and ostracism for those who overstep the bounds of the acceptable." We may no longer suffer the mood swings of an irritated Zeus, an easily affronted Hera or a petty Poseidon. But we do have to survive the topsy-turvy politics of Donald Trump or the mischiefs of Elon Musk, the man-child.
At his best, Fry’s comic genius is risqué and tongue in cheek. In a story overflowing with sexual violence, incest and unconventional liaisons, to put things mildly, the best policy may be to not get too caught up in the finer details, he advises. “I don’t recommend thinking too hard about these relationships. They do a person’s head in."
Fry’s riffs on etymology and pronunciation deserve special mention. In case you’re stuck saying “Arsinoë," try “Arse-in-oh-way". As for the stuff that puts the lotus eaters into a stupor, here’s Fry’s erudite guesswork: “lettuce is well known for its soporific qualities… Beatrix Potter remarks upon it in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, where it sends the young rabbits to sleep."
Fry’s masterstroke, for me, is his take on the scholarly debates on authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey. “We might recoil at the idea, but the current thinking on who Homer was—a kind of crowd-sourced compendium—could remind us of the way generative (i.e. content-producing) AI works." Now that’s a theory both his older and newer readers may want to get behind.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.
