While I enjoyed Stephen Fry’s Mythos tolerably well a few years ago, it didn’t fire up my engines so much that I went after the next ones immediately; recently a Greek wind has hit my imagination, though, and after listening to The Odyssey, the only thing to do would be to order Captain Fry to tack back towards Troy. As with his prior works, Troy is a composite. Fry incorporates stories that were connected to the Iliad as well as the Iliad proper — and well he must, because The Iliad doesn’t refer to the sack of Troy at all, except in ominous prophecy. It ends, in fact, with the lion-hearted Achilles relenting from his sorrow and rage and allowing the aged Priam to reclaim his son Hector’s body for proper burial. When Fry said, “Here ends Homer — but not the war”, I checked the time register — three hours left. While Troy is a grand story of huge human personalities clashing against one another, it’s also one of the gods being absolute bloody nuisances. Even the storm-gatherer Zeus has to call his children out on it after Ares limps back to Olympus holding his innards in because some plucky Mortal given eyes to see threw a spear right at the lord of war. (Said mortal also stabbed Aphrodite, which is unchivalrous but holy Zeus did she have it coming. The entire bloody war is her fault!) The gods are all over the place meddling; the cursed Paris would be mourning the lack of mirrors in Hades, and the armies gone home, if Aphrodite (you again!) didn’t interfere to prevent Menelaus from strangling him. At one point, Achilles’ fury is such that he kills so many Trojans in the river Scamander that the river itself starts attacking him, at which point other gods take pity on the son of Peleus and stay the river with fire. So wild is the imagination of men, yet 21st century movie theaters can’t vomit anything else up but hackneyed sequels.

As with Fry’s other books, I enjoyed his little sidebars and stuff, but his talent for a wide range of voices allows the many strong characters here to shine. The Iliad is agog with huge personalities, and many of them are those who people who’ve only seen Troy have forgotten — like Diomedes, who would be the action hero of the Achaeans if not for Achilles — at least, until the little worm Paris shot him in the foot. What is it with you and shooting grown men in the foot? (Diomedes at least gets to start mocking Paris, whereas Achilles had been hit by a poisoned arrow and had less opportunity to entertain the troops.) They’re also more complex than popular presentations show: while Agamemnon had serious faults as a man and a leader, we get to see him earn his title of Agamemnon, Ruler of Men here, as well as admit his faults. Sure, he’s trying to get Achilles to stop sulking in his tent, and as such is willing to give him seven cities, various women — including his pick of Agamemnon’s daughters as wife — as well as the concubine Achilles has been brooding over, but gosh darn it, he sounds sincere. Paris….Paris does not become more sympathetic. He’s one of my least favorite characters in all of fiction, a character who inspires revulsion, disdain, and contempt on my part; I didn’t realize, however, how wholly inadequate my loathing for him was until listening to Troy. The little git not only kidnapped a woman, he used her husband being away from the palace to attend a funeral to completely rob the man — violating all the rules of proper guest behavior — and then decided to hit up a few other places and kill another man on his way home. Fry really leans into the sheer weirdness of Greek stories.

While I expected to be entertained — Fry is never not entertaining — the advantage of sinking into a story I knew fairly well, plus the strengths of that story itself and the sheer chaotic absurdity the gods add — made this a fantastic treatment of Homer & co. Will I be finishing the quadrilogy with Heroes? Eh, we’ll see: while it does have some familiar names like Jason and Heracles, I have just listened to 20+ hours of Stephen Fry talking in the last two weeks.

Related:
The Illiad, Homer. Translated by Robert Fagles.