Canvas books wrap: Ancient Greeks, The World in 2050 and Bede Scott

Bede Scott. Photo / Supplied

Battles, gods, goddesses. Venture towards the mythical with David Herkt, who charts old and new literary heroics centred on Ancient Greece. Alternatively, set your thoughts on the year 2050 as a new book by a British financial journalist takes an educated guess at what that might look like. Elsewhere, author Bede Scott discusses retro thrillers, "code-switching" from academic writing, and the books he's currently turning through. Happy reading.

ANCIENT STORIES, MODERN VOICES

David Herkt revisits the (Greek) classics.

When I was around 7, my grandmother gave our family one of the most valuable gifts I have ever received. It was a subscription to a children's magazine called Finding Out, which included retellings of Homer's 3000-year-old stories The Iliad and Odyssey illustrated by twin sisters Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. It had battles, gods, goddesses, mortal heroes and frightening monsters.

The Iliad tells of the abduction of Helen of Troy and the 10-year battle by the Greeks to recover her. The Odyssey is the adventures of Odysseus on his long voyage home from the Trojan War and his encounters with a one-eyed cyclops, seductive sirens and many other mythical beings. It culminates with him discovering his home is filled with boorish suitors for his wife's hand – and the deadly consequences.

I have never stopped using those stories in my head. They have been of extraordinary use, helping me through tertiary education, in work presentations, in my own wider reading - and when called upon to produce a story for a restless child at bedtime.

It is a challenge to make these stories accessible in a world that lacks an old-fashioned classical education. Who speaks ancient Greek anymore? Actor and writer Stephen Fry in Mythos (Michael Joseph, $26) and its sequels Heroes (Michael Joseph, $26) and Troy (Michael Joseph, $26) gives them a contemporary twist while staying close to the originals and their essential strangeness. These myths originate in a world that is not ours and Fry, for all his geniality, does not forget it.

Both The Iliad and Odyssey were poems memorised by travelling bards who sang them to their first audiences. There are exact translations like those of Richard Lattimore and the very recent Caroline Alexander. However, the British poet Christopher Logue's almost-cinematic collected War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $37) is probably the best recent poetic re-visioning. As the short component volumes were issued, the covers featured a sepia-toned Masai warrior on the first and an army attack-helicopter on the last, indicating the tenor of Logue's work. He mingles ancient and new to potent effect. The arrival of the god Apollo in Book 16, the Patrocleia, is a theatrical coup.

Recently, Homer's epic poems have been retold by a number of women novelists. Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls (Penguin, $26) examines the war through the experiences of Briseis, the captured concubine of the Greek hero, Achilles. It feels distinctly different from the male-led heroics to which we are accustomed. It is a novel about bloody human events and their very savage consequences. Briseis is captured, fought over, and faces the loss of everything she knows.

Nathalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships (PanMacmillan $25), on the other hand, is a panoramic novel, told by the muse of epic poetry, Calliope. Haynes gives many of the women of Homer's works a voice. It is a subversive and fascinating book, picking up the old myths and "shaking them" until their hidden details fall out.

Homer's two poems are among humanity's oldest narratives. They have been frequently reworked in the past and still provide the plots for contemporary streamed drama series. To fail to know them is to miss out on who we are.

Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes is at the Auckland Museum until November 6.

The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future by Hamish McRae
(Bloomsbury, $33). Reviewed by Eleanor Black.

At a time when the world feels especially chaotic, it can be comforting to read books that attempt to put our existence into some sort of context, neatly charted and graphed and tabled so we can compare ourselves to other eras of human history.

Before he takes us on a journey 30 years into the future, British financial journalist Hamish McRae reminds us that right now, in 2022, we live in a more prosperous, less violent, more tolerant, healthier and better-educated world than ever. Hurrah! Set aside for a moment the Ukraine, Johnny Depp v Amber Heard, Roe v Wade, US school shootings, long Covid, and whatever else is bothering you this week and do a little celebratory jig.

Okay, so looking ahead. With an overriding interest in money systems, McRae is unsurprisingly all about the numbers. He has ingested vast swathes of data to come up with predictions for the world economy, political relationships, the environment, technology and conflict. Big takeaways from The World in 2050 include the continuing economic dominance of China and its political flexing, the massive potential of the Pacific, the increased influence of a global middle class and the role of technology in solving human-made problems like climate change.

McRae does seem to have a blind spot when it comes to race, surely more influential, potentially divisive and transformative than he suggests. And while climate change worries him, he does not seem as alarmed as he perhaps should be, possibly because he gives humans so much credit for being able to see the problem and take action – and because "we have nowhere else to go". His primary concerns are that the US political system could fall apart leaving a power vacuum; that India, China and the US might clash; that "Russia overplays its hand"; and that the information revolution makes us insular and clannish rather than better informed. (That last one has already happened, hasn't it?)

He doesn't give Aotearoa more than a few scant pages (shared with Australia, of course), but McRae is optimistic about our prospects. "The rougher the world becomes, it would seem the more attractive the outlook for New Zealand," he writes. He believes in a bright future for what he calls the Anglosphere, the English-speaking countries that will by 2050 be responsible for 40 per cent of the world's GDP. (He includes India and Nigeria in that group, by the way.)

Australia and Aotearoa will be "pulled along" by the Anglosphere's success, he says. "They will be junior members of an elite premier league club. They have a fascinating hand of cards to play, perhaps the most interesting of any two countries in the world. Will they play them skillfully? Probably yes. So not one lucky country, but two."

While McRae takes a noticeably white, Eurocentric approach to his analysis – which suggests he may not have as good a handle on the developing world as on his home territory – he does have a track record for successfully predicting global outcomes. His book The World in 2020, released in 1994, foresaw a global pandemic (tick), a broadly more prosperous and more peaceful world (tick?), and a struggle on the part of "advanced" countries to continue to raise the standard of living for their citizens. That has definitely happened, if you take home ownership and real wages as your gauge.

5 QUICK QUESTIONS WITH BEDE SCOTT

Bede Scott. Photo / Supplied

You live and teach in Singapore. What took you there?

When I finished my PhD in 2006, I managed to find a job at a university in Singapore – and I've been here ever since. It's a bit like the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. I keep thinking I'm going to leave, but I never quite get around to it.

Too Far From Antibes is your first novel. How have you managed the transition from academic writing to popular writing?

I've actually been doing both simultaneously, sometimes on the same day, which can be a bit disorientating. In the end, it took about a year to write the novel, and it involved quite a lot of "code-switching" – moving back and forth between the different idioms of literary criticism and crime fiction. But the two activities aren't entirely incompatible. As a literary critic, you also spend a lot of time exploring motives and looking for hidden "clues".

The book is described as a "retro thriller". What are your influences?

My most obvious influence would have to be the novels of Eric Ambler – and particularly the classics he produced in the late 1930s: Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios, and Journey into Fear. I wanted my protagonist, Jean-Luc Guery, to be fallible and beleaguered, like Ambler's heroes. But I also wanted to keep things fairly light, and in this regard Graham Greene was another strong influence. I was trying to reproduce the atmosphere of Greene's "entertainments" – books like The Third Man or Our Man in Havana – that manage to maintain a comic tone while telling a story of suspense and intrigue.

What drew you to the thriller genre?

I first became interested in the genre when I read The Mask of Dimitrios – Ambler's 1939 masterpiece about a novelist, Charles Latimer, who decides to follow the trail of a notorious criminal from Istanbul to Paris. And as for the future, I would quite like to write a book called Down and Out in Algiers, but that's all I've got so far.

Who are you reading right now?

I've just finished reading James Kestrel's Five Decembers, which is a thriller set in Honolulu, Hong Kong, and Tokyo during the early 1940s. It's published by Hard Case Crime and it's absolutely outstanding – in the same league as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.

Too Far From Antibes, by Kiwi academic Bede Scott (Penguin, $37), is out now.