Review to “Glorious Exploits” by Ferdia Lennon
This has to be the best book that I’ve read in several years, or the one who scratches the greatest number of itches among various interests. It begins as a comedy of war, drawing on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Plutarch’s accounts of Athenian prisoners of war who survived the aftermath of the failed Sicilian expedition by reciting lines from Euripides but also—in more recent memory—recreates the emotional weight of episodes described by survivors of 20th century wars. The darkness is viewed, at the start, obliquely, but if the reader does not see it, it is because they choose not to, because it is always present.
As time passes, and the Athenians in the quarry continue to starve, the option will be taken away from them. It is a lot of fun, and I think a certain kind of reader needs to be tricked this way into acknowledging certain realities. You laugh along with one character, an unemployed potter helping his friend to stage a play, while another, right next to him, is experiencing the horrors of starvation—and two minutes ago he witnessed his loved one clubbed to death by a man who lost his son to the invading army. They are experiencing, in simultaneous, two completely different stories. The reader holds these contradictions within themselves for a great part of the story.
Another episode, from close to beginning of the book, as not to spoil the tale: a drunken evening at the pub, described with great accuracy to those settings where such things as pubs exist. An insecure man negs a woman who happens to be a slave, captured in war.
It is effective at what it does, and I commend the author for finishing it, for not giving up—I listened to an interview with him where he said that it took him seven years, on and off. It was worth it not only for the recognition he received for his efforts but because it is a contribution to the human culture. More and more we need to find ways for people to face certain topics that they would shelter themselves from, now when they are most important, even something as basic as recognising the humanity of others. It is a well-researched story set in Classical Greece, but it could not be successful if it weren’t also actual. I have seen some criticisms about how you cannot joke about some of the topics covered in the book, but perhaps it is not for those people, who already understand what they refer to. They can move on to more serious matters, but there are others who understand only through jokes, through lightness, or they feel threatened and cease to pay attention.
I’ll not ruin the ending, but it was the piece that completed the puzzle, in more than one way. I laughed, I cried, I cared a lot. And it made me want to reread The History of the Peloponnesian War.
