Micro Review 10 (2024) Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

 

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Penguin Books)

As I started reading the books for the Debut Fiction Prize so late I was aware that this was the overall winner as I started it, and as I've enjoyed all the books so far (and one is one of my top reads of the year) this one had an awful lot to live up to.

Again on paper the book was right up my street:

An exhilarating, fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art, and of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined...

The author is also based in Norwich so another tick in its favour...

Sadly the book wasn't quite my cup of tea, I had hoped that it was just the abridged Book at Bedtime version that wasn't for me and that the full book would connect.

I can't quite put my finger on why the book didn't work for me. The story was interesting, I knew both Euripides plays being performed and the characters/setting were strong. I also quite liked the way the characters spoke in a vernacular way, it just left me cold and I didn't find it either a comedy or a tragedy.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the discussions where the winner was chosen to find out why this one won - it was good but just not a winner in my mind.

Ooops!

I had no idea that it was nearly 2 months since my last update - it has been a busy time but I think that I blame the heat/humidity since our return mostly for this big gap.

We had an amazing time on holiday, we were incredibly lazy while there and spent 13 out of the 14 days lounging around catching up on sleep, reading and sampling the wonderful local food & wine.

While by no means reaching pre-haemorrhage book totals I had made the right choice in saving up some of the fiction releases from the past few months and I think that these two in particular will feature highly on my end of the year round ups...


Those Who Were Loved by Victoria Hislop

Hislop has returned to modern Greek history for this book, and it charts the story of one Athenian family through the turbulent twentieth century. I knew that Greece had swung from right to left politically as well as from monarchy to junta but not a lot of the detail.
Hislop has told this tale through the story of four siblings and their grandmother and this allows all sides of the political spectrum to be explored as each character has different ideals.

My one reservation with the book is that I found the ending a little rushed, I wish that it was a two-parter. I wanted to spend more time with all of the characters!

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

This is another Greek book but this one took me back to the end of the Trojan War and was everything that Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls wasn't.  The premise in this retelling is that the poet Homer is trying to compose his epic tales but is a little stuck for inspiration, he has called on a muse to help and she is telling him the tale but from the viewpoint of all the women swept up in the chaos. 

This was a great retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey and I liked the way the stories wove themselves together in a way that was utterly modern (and very funny at times) and yet reminiscent of the classics from Homer onwards. I'm loving this vogue for retelling the classics and hope that there are lots more to come.

Now we're back home a lot of my reservations from the library have come in, and I'm reading for one of my non-bloggable projects, so hopefully I'll have more books to talk about soon.

Talking Books: The Children of Jocasta

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes.

I think my love of Greece and all things Greek shines through on this blog, from reworkings of the myths and legends through to seeing plays from millennia ago in the original language! I've been looking forward to this book since last November when Natalie Haynes spoke about it at the Heffer's Classics Forum.

This is Haynes' reworking of the stories behind the plays Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone but focuses her dual time line on two female characters who feature almost as throwaway lines.

At the very start I was a little unsure about the book, I couldn't place where the prologue fitted in to the tale at all and this confused me but once the story proper started with chapters alternating between generations I was hooked completely and stayed up far too late reading the book because I just couldn't put it down.

The characters were hugely realistic and vivid while the prose and descriptions really brought to life how the Hellenes lived. I've visited the ruins in Greece and know how the palaces work in theory but this book really made the stones I've visited into a living place

I knew the rough outlines of the stories behind the novel but Haynes used her knowledge of all versions of the stories to weave a brilliant tale that made me think about all the ideas I held about the characters and to think about the tales from a female point of view.

I think that this book would be just as enjoyable if you don't know much about the original stories/plays and that Haynes adds to them rather than anything else, I now want to search out Sophocles' other Oedipus play and also the mentions of him in Homer's Odyssey - oh and Anouilh's version of Antigone...

Theatre 2016: Review Thirty

Cambridge Greek Plays 2016, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge. October 2016.

I can't believe that three years have already gone past since the we had a really mixed experience at the 2013 Greek Play - this time without Rebecca who decided that once was enough!

This time the serious drama was Antigone and not at all a chore to watch.  The cast were uniformly superb as they performed Sophocles's play. This is the third in a trilogy but the story telling was so clear that from the start you knew exactly what was going on, and I found it an emotional watch. Even though this play is nearly 2500 years old the point couldn't be clearer and in today's political uncertain times a play reminding us that dictators who don't listen are dangerous. Is upsetting the accepted status quo the same thing as upsetting the Gods? The setting was also very clever (although one of my companions wasn't so sure), it reminded me of the wonderful Othello at the National Theatre - again something that predisposed me to like this play perhaps.

After the interval we came back in for Aristophanes's Lysistrata - the comedy.  From the outset the audience is under no misapprehension that this is being played for laughs - the surtitles even tell you so! In this play the women of Greece are fed up of the war and so go on a sex strike until peace is declared. Plenty of scope for humour, and this was really piled up during the performance and for me it just went that little bit too far. I had to spend so much time reading the surtitles that I lost a lot of the action on the stage and it was also so contemporary and politically up-to-date that I also lost the original play.  It was great fun, I laughed lots and it was wonderfully risque at times but I have no clear idea of how the original play panned out.

I'm really glad I went, and it was good to see a packed out house for such a niche production but again for me it was a game of two halves, and this time it was the serious play that was the hit.

Theatre 2015: Review Thirty-Four

Medea, Almeida Theatre, London. October 2015.

After a surprisingly enjoyable Bakkhai and a throughly disappointing Oresteia I really wasn't sure what to expect with my third Greek play of the year, and this was possibly the best way to go in.

This was a retelling of the play with a very feminist slant which while being quite a good play I really am unlikely to have gone to see it without the title.

I am an oddity, I like Greek drama - I like seeing Greek drama as it was written (and yes that does include in the original language). I like the plots, the style and the language and not one of these elements was really present in this play.

However I didn't hate it, I liked the nods to the original, for example, as in the original,  Medea's husband has left her for a younger woman but in this version rather than actually being royal she is just her daddy's princess.  Other bits were funny and although not as good as in the Bakkai I liked what the chorus were trying to do.

However as a modern play about a woman breaking down after her husband has left her... it all felt a little bit like I'd seen or heard it before.  It was competent and I didn't hate it but if that was a person's introduction to classical Greek drama they are in for a big shock when they see a more authentic version.

Also unlike the poster intimates, and early images led me to believe, this was a remarkably violence free interpretation of the text and I think that it lost out because of that, I know that the idea was you don't have to use violence to hurt people but that is what the original is about.

Theatre 2015: Review Twenty-Seven (sort of)

The Oresteia, Shakespeare's Globe, London. August 2015.

With this play Mr Norfolkbookworm and I did something that we've only done once before in all the years we've been going to the theatre - we left before the end.

I appreciate that we only saw the second preview of this and so perhaps we were a little harsh, but I'm afraid that after 85 minutes we had had enough.  I am still going to review what we saw however because although we only saw Act I this was the entire play Agamemnon which forms the first part of the Oresteia trilogy.

Agamemnon deals with the end of the Trojan War and the return of King Agamemnon to his kingdom and wife after a 10 year absence.  He returns with the doomed prophetess Cassandra and the knowledge that he'd tricked his wife and sacrificed his daughter to guarantee luck at the start of the war.  It seems he is welcomed home by a loving wife but it goes bloodily wrong very quickly.

My problems with this production were many...

I have pretty good hearing and yet so many of the lines were spoken from the Groundling area or by the cast with their backs to me that I couldn't hear them.

Many of the lines were accompanied by music, which meant that even when the cast were facing me I couldn't hear them.

The costumes were all over the place. The Chorus appeared to be from the 1940s - especially the women who looked like they were stereo typical members of the French Resistance.  Clytemnestra and her attendants looked like they'd stepped out of a 1960s Mary Quant fashion show (or if you are being less generous off the set of the Austin Powers films). The Greek army were in modern battledress with nightsticks and helmets.  To cap it all Agamemnon appeared in a traditional Ancient Greek costume.

My final problem was with the gore - there was so much that it lost all impact, there was no shock value at all and it all just seemed pantomime.

As I said I can't let you know how the final two parts of the trilogy were performed, I'm afraid we left.  I suppose I will always be a little curious but I don't regret leaving.