GLORIOUS EXPLOITS, by Ferdia Lennon
There is a small, moving detail in Plutarch’s account of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse during the final stages of the Peloponnesian War.
In 412 BC, the Athenian forces, then the dominant power in the Aegean, overplayed their hand. Routed in a brutal sea battle, rounded up as prisoners into the quarries of Syracuse and given starvation rations, some Athenians survived, Plutarch writes, because the Syracusans so loved the tragedies of Euripides that they offered food or freedom in exchange for verses. It would be like if the Viet Cong released American P.O.W.s for singing Elvis.
“They say that many Athenians who reached home in safety greeted Euripides with affectionate hearts,” Plutarch wrote, and told him “that they had been set free from slavery for rehearsing what they remembered of his works.”
This is the seed of Ferdia Lennon’s breezy, winning debut, “Glorious Exploits,” set in ancient Syracuse but written in the language of contemporary Ireland, where Lennon was raised. There has been a pleasing recent turn away from making ancient people in fiction speak in the style of Victorian poets — handmaidens, smiting, woe, bosoms, etc. — including Emily Wilson’s sublimely wry, unpretentious Homer translations and Pat Barker’s (less successful) feminist retellings of Athenian tragedy.
Lennon’s vernacular gives the novel a shambolic charm, a story told in a Dublin bar by a drunk lurching between poetry and obscenity — your best friend tonight even if he might not remember you tomorrow.
Lampo, the narrator, is an illiterate, unemployed potter with a love of wine. He begins the story on a sunny morning, going to the quarry with his friend Gelon to “feed the Athenians,” the way someone might idly feed ducks.
They smell the captives before seeing them. “Ah, and I like the way they smell,” thinks Lampo. “It’s awful, but it’s wonderful awful. They smell like victory and more. Every Syracusan feels it when they get that smell. Even the slaves feel it. Rich or poor, free or not, you get a whiff of those pits, and your life seems somehow richer than it did before, your blankets warmer, your food tastier.”
The Athenians also serve another purpose. “A mouthful of olives for some ‘Medea,’” Gelon shouts, as the starving captives crowd around, trying to remember lines. Eventually, the two plot to put on a full production of “Medea” — with chorus, masks and more — along with Euripides’ newest tragedy, “The Trojan Women,” never before seen in Sicily.
The middle of the novel is essentially a buddy comedy: They secure the backing of a mysterious funder, Lampo spends their money on booze and clothes, they pick up ruffians eager to help and they grow somewhat fond of the Athenians (Lampo periodically ruffles their hair, which floats away in the breeze from malnutrition).
This is all fun — I first read the novel in one happy sitting, on a plane — but Lennon attempts to go deeper, with mixed success. One sign of ambition is his choice of play: Euripides probably wrote some 90 in his lifetime, and Plutarch doesn’t specify which the captives sang for freedom.
“Medea,” one of his most famous, is an obvious choice. But “Trojan Women” — about Hecuba, Cassandra, and the women left after the sacking of Troy as they wait to be taken into slavery — is something else. Instead of the typical tragic arc from power to ruin, it begins and ends in misery. The classicist Gilbert Murray described it like this: “The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life.”
“Trojan Women” was likely at least partly inspired by the Athenian army’s slaughter of the entire adult male population of Melos the year before it premiered. The men were butchered, the women and children sold, in a tactic summarized by Thucydides as “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
This setup — conquerors made captive, then made to play versions of their own victims before an audience of their recent conquerors — promises an interesting experiment about reversal, sympathy, and power. But instead, the novel seems to assert rather than show or interrogate its central idea, a vague one about the power of storytelling — a phrase that makes me feel like a dutiful A.P. English student or the kind of person who owns an “I <3 BOOKS” mug.
In “The Iliad,” Hecuba says that she wants to cannibalize her son’s killer, to “eat his liver” like a carrion bird on the battlefields of Troy. In “Medea,” the queen’s rage at her unfaithful husband is so great that she slaughters her own children. These are stories about deep, excruciating ties of love and friendship and family, severed again and again by war and death.
There’s nothing approximating that depth of feeling in Lennon’s novel. Relationships feel like those between drinking buddies: affectionate and fun, but bloodless.
GLORIOUS EXPLOITS | By Ferdia Lennon | Holt | 289 pp. | $26.99
