Stories about the power of stories are an easy sell; in part, I think, because they subtly ennoble the producer and the consumer of those stories, shedding a glow of valour on the profession of the former and chosen leisure pursuit of the latter. Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories – and the spiritual and emotional succour they give – though, fortunately, too much of a clever one to fall entirely into the mode of blithe self-congratulation.
It is 412BC, the Peloponnesian war rages, and the Sicilian city of Syracuse has been “turned inside out and on its head” by a failed Athenian invasion. New trade routes are opening, fresh injections of capital are augmenting a crumbling civic infrastructure, and bustling portside taverns brim with gold, enslaved people and democratic idealism. But while Syracuse flourishes, reminders of violence so recently endured are everywhere – not least in the limestone quarries on the outskirts of the city, where thousands of Athenian prisoners have been left, chained, to starve out their last days under a white-hot Mediterranean sun.
Enter Lampo and Gelon, two directionless, unemployed potters, childhood friends who share a love of Homer and not much else. Their dynamic is classic mismatched-buddy comedy from the outset. Lampo is a cheerfully indifferent bullshitter, who spends his days planning robberies and negging attractive tavern slaves. Gelon is a taciturn aesthete, in mourning for his dead son and fled wife. Together, they visit the quarry, trading mouthfuls of bread and cheese with the wasting prisoners in exchange for half-remembered snatches from the plays of Euripides – the finest of the Greek dramatists, to Gelon’s mind. “No Sophocles, nor Aeschylus, nor any other Athenian poet. You can recite them if it pleases you, but water and cheese are only for Euripides … A mouthful of olives for some Medea?” Soon, their ambitions extend further. They will stage Medea for themselves, right there in the sun-baked quarry, with the prisoners as their actors.
The action takes place over just a few weeks, and the novel clips along in a tidy prose judiciously filigreed with some lovely image-making and the odd Homeric epithet: the sun is “white and fat like a gluttonous star”, the skin on a worker’s fingers puckers “like curdled milk”, an actor’s hands twist in the air “like strange flowers in a storm”. What else could the sea be but “wine-dark”? In their first visit to a theatrical costumier, Lampo and Gelon see “a little ginger cat … licking at the gold paint on one of the fake crowns so that its tongue glints in its gob”. Gorgeous.
Lennon’s most significant innovation is introducing a modern Irish vernacular to his classical setting, but if you’re fine with a BCE Sicilian shop owner saying, “Sure, time flies is what it does” – and, let’s face it, who but the most tiresome of historical purists wouldn’t be? – you’ll stop noticing after a few chapters. The friends’ mysterious benefactor “from the Tin Islands” named Tuireann (an Irish variant of “Taranis”, the ancient pan-Celtic thunder god) provides a contextualising link between the Hellenic and Gaelic narrative traditions that Lennon clearly holds in equal reverence.
The novel is told exclusively from Lampo’s perspective, and while he makes for an amiable narrator, there are some points where his perspective jars. I liked him as a disinterested militiaman (he observes that killing “is a good buzz”, if “weird”), but found him – and the novel overall – much less convincing once the gallows humour of the opening chapters gives way to the aphoristic sentimentality of the later ones. It’s hard to say anything new about the caprices of the classical pantheon, but observations like “for the world was once just a dream in a god’s eye, and the man who gives up on himself makes that very same god look away” packed about as much emotional and intellectual heft as a novelty fridge magnet.
The novel’s brevity also precludes much meaningful engagement with its themes of poverty, incarceration and exploitation. Although Lampo and Gelon’s perspective on their actions alters as their relationships with the Athenians deepen, Lennon’s reverence for their theatrical undertaking – for art, for stories, for this business we call show – glosses somewhat over the moral queasiness of their methods. To me, the novel often contradicted its own suggestion that tragedies ought to teach us there is “dignity even in the worst that could happen under the sky”, apparently unintentionally.
There’s still a lot to like in the book, even when the sitcom sensibility starts to buckle under the weight of its premise. I was left wanting more, in part because I suspect Lennon can deliver it, but I have no doubt this breezy novel will win him many fans.
• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon will be published by Fig Tree on 16 January (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
