This immensely likable debut novel from Irish writer Ferdia Lennon opens in Syracuse, south-east Sicily, in 412BC. The city has lately defeated a military expedition from Athens and thousands of surviving invaders have been thrown into nearby quarries to rot. No Syracusans lament their fate until two locals visit one day with an idea to cast the prisoners in a play by Euripides.
The two men are Gelon, a melancholy theatre obsessive, and his wisecracking friend Lampo, who narrates the novel in a distinctly un-Sicilian voice. “Would you be knowing any passages?” he demands of a near-dead Athenian, seeking an actor to play Jason in Medea. Soon the pair are sneaking down daily to rehearse their ragtag troupe for a double bill to which the whole town is invited.
It’s an uproarious premise, but Irish accents aside, the scenario isn’t quite as far-fetched as it might appear. There are accounts in Plutarch of Athenian prisoners in Sicily trading lines of Euripides in return for food and drink or even freedom. The novel is raucously funny – Lampo is a brilliant comic creation – but Lennon, a classics graduate, blends the laughs with tragedy of the blackest pitch.
The writing is beautifully controlled. The eyes of a vengeful Syracusan, hollowed out by grief, become “a black sea under an eclipse”. Gelon’s breath, in one dismal scene, “makes weird shapes in the air like grey flowers are bursting from his lips and wilting on the wind”.
Lampo does atrocious things in a bid to be helpful. Scrabbling for money to buy costumes, he proposes robbing an old man with no legs. Later, marvelling that strangers gave up their lives to save his, he wonders if he’d have done the same. “Not at all,” he decides. But his experience in the quarries, collaborating with enemies to shed light on human suffering through theatre, does unlock selfless impulses he never knew he had.
Lennon stops well short of suggesting that stories have the power to heal the world, but – just sometimes – they can make a difference to individual lives. As Lampo puts it in a moment of fleeting optimism: “I’m pouring water in the desert, hoping flowers grow.”
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
