I went into this one at a timely moment, The Odyssey movie is set to be released in a few weeks time. Odyssey is book 4 in Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology series. This is the first one that I would say is book for book; while the other books in Fry’s series pull from multiple sources for the content, this is book is more or less based on Homer’s Odyssey. Fry has pulled in other elements, the meat and potatoes of the book come from the one principal source.
In my personal opinion, the Audible is the way to go for all of these books; Fry isn’t your typical author, he is a performer and Odyssey is a performance. One might say that Fry brought this back to the original intended presentation.
As a fan of these old stories, I really enjoyed Fry’s humorous take. You are more likely to get surprises from the acknowledgements and afterword than from the story itself, but it is all about the presentation.
You could get into all of the social changes that took place in the late bronze age of Greece during the period following the war that took place in the Dardanelles as depicted by Homer hundreds of years later, but that is a whole lot of academia that no one really wants here.
If you know the story, you will enjoy this retelling. If you don’t know the story, this could be a great spot to get a heads-up before Matt Damon steps into Odysseus’s sandals.
*4 Stars
