The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010)

“They were gone for a very long time. When they returned, Troy had been abandoned, its moss-stained walls as worn as mountain-sides, the rusting hulks of war machines decaying on its parapets amid the tatterdemalion shells of factories. The levels of the Greek palace had multiplied, gone deeper – now it resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth.” (from the chapter “Agamemnon and the Word”)

In his ingenious and exquisitely written debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachery Mason takes the characters and legends well-known from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and looks at them from a variety of different perspectives. The premise of the novel involves the discovery of a series of fragments, each presenting an alternate account of the characters and stories connected to Odysseus. Here we have multiple versions of Odysseus’ homecoming, of his adventures and the figures he encountered, even a variety of characterizations of Odysseus himself. In some stories he is the Odysseus that we have always known, cunning and brave and blessed by Athena; in others he is cowardly and will do anything to avoid fighting. In one story (told from the perspective of Polyphemus) he is a pirate who maliciously mutilates an inhospitable hermit. These portrayals play on aspects of Odysseus’ personality that have always been present and taken together they give us a full and very complex picture of one of mythology’s most celebrated heroes.

Odysseus is not the centre of every fragment and in some he does not figure directly. One story, for example, recounts the myth of Theseus and ends with an abandoned and betrayed Ariadne transforming into Calypso. Another explains the Iliad and Odyssey as elaborate chess manuals, and one reimagines the odyssey as belonging to Alexander the Great, who longs to emulate Achilles but finds that he has more in common with Odysseus.

Each story is beautifully written, full of striking imagery and wit. The stories are told in very precise fashion but are self-contained so that the novel can be opened to any chapter and enjoyed. Prior to the novel’s publication it would have been easy to argue that there was absolutely no need for more Odyssey inspired stories, but The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a terrific addition to the mythological canon.