Returning to the classics to make sense of the present is a master strategy of modern Irish writing. In Ulysses, James Joyce deploys the template of the Odyssey to cast an epic grandeur on his bumbling Dublin everyman. Patrick Kavanagh’s poems about squabbling Monaghan farmers are underwritten by the words of Homer’s ghost: “I made the Iliad from such a local row.”
More recently, the poets of the Northern Troubles have found in Troy a mirror of their own “local row”. We think of Seamus Heaney’s ominous Mycenae Lookout, or Michael Longley’s hopeful Ceasefire, written in the wake of the paramilitary cessations of 1994, with its clipped and devastating final couplet spoken by King Priam: “I get down on my knees, and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
In his rollicking debut novel, Dublin native Ferdia Lennon puts a fresh spin on this tradition. Set in Sicily’s Syracuse in 412BC, Glorious Exploits brings an Irish comic sensibility to the world of classical tragedy. Athens’ grand invasion has failed. Thousands of starving Athenians are imprisoned in the Syracuse quarries. Gelon, a theatre buff, and his feckless sidekick Lampo spend their days feeding bread and wine to the prisoners in exchange for snatched quotations from Sophocles and Euripides. Then Gelon forms a plan. Why not mount a full production of Medea with a cast of prisoners – men, after all, who have seen the real thing in Athens – with the quarry as ready-made amphitheatre?
Much of the novel is taken up with the preparations for this performance. Gelon and Lampo assemble their cast, auditioning prisoners for the lead roles and chorus. They source costumes and props, haggle for backdrops, conduct rehearsals, recruit a string of urchins as production assistants. There is an engaging Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern dimension to all this activity, taking place as it does in the shadow of the great play, a play whose themes of exile, death and vengeance hit home to all the actors. And for all the knockabout humour, Lennon never lets us lose sight of the stakes. The Athenians, quite literally, are acting for their lives, kept alive by extra rations on the understanding that they will entertain their captors at the grand opening night.
A lesser writer might have used this scenario to make anodyne points about the power of art to bring people together. “Not since the war have so many Syracusans and Athenians been together in one place,” as Lampo observes when the play is about to start. But Lennon is not naive. The playgoing Syracusans are seated on the makeshift graves of Athenians who plotted to enslave them. Art doesn’t dissolve difference, as a shocking coup de théâtre at the climax of the performance makes horribly clear. But art can allow you to see the humanity in your enemy. “I don’t hate you,” Gelon tells the Athenians. “I believe any city that gave us these plays has something worth saving.”
Setting a novel in ancient Sicily throws up its share of challenges, not least on the question of language. Which variety of English will your characters use? A stilted, deadly correct translatorese (“Gelon, you speak the truth”) is one possibility. But the riskier path, and the one taken here, is to find some equivalent in the palette of modern English for your characters’ signature idiom. Daringly, and for the most part triumphantly, Lennon gives his jobless Sicilian potters a customised Northside Dublin vernacular. They aye and naw. They eff and blind. Words like “gobshite”, “mot”, and “bollix” roll from their tongues, alongside “chiton” and “drachmae”. They say things like “Grand, so” and “I swear on my ma’s life” and “Pericles is a prick!”
The effect is to bring the world of classical antiquity hurtling into the present, while the story bowls along in propulsive bursts of scabrous dialogue. But Glorious Exploits is more than simply Roddy Doyle in Syracuse. Lennon’s argot-nauts go high as well as low, leavening their gobby talk with riffs of lyrical uplift, particularly when describing the landscape.
The moon above Syracuse is “a silver grin in the sky” or “a yellow bone being gnawed by cloud”. On a seaside path, Lampo sees “medusas of seaweed heaped in glistening bunches”. Lampo also does a nice line in Chandleresque simile: “You could taste their doubt in the air, like fetid rain on the wind.”
Glorious Exploits is that rare thing: a debut of genuine freshness, verve and ambition. Ferdia Lennon has taken a vignette from Plutarch’s Lives – theatre-mad Sicilians giving food to Athenian prisoners in return for “specimens and morsels” of Euripides – and built a powerful novel around it. It is a novel that enacts the words it ascribes to Euripides: “The world is a wounded thing that can only be healed by story”.
