In an interview on Love and Greats

What about The Odyssey? Can you actually read it for fun and get involved in it?

It’s a very easy read, and a completely different world from The Iliad. Whereas The Iliad depicts a militaristic and war-wrecked world, The Odyssey is like a fairy tale and it’s fascinatingly complex. It’s told in flashbacks, it has time that’s extended and time that’s compressed, and it’s told from different viewpoints. We think of it as Odysseus’s story – his ten-year journey from Troy back to his home in Ithaca – but also a large part of it, which a lot of people forget, or don’t know, is about his son Telemachus, growing up in Ithaca and becoming a man: recognising, both literally and metaphorically, that he is the true son of his father.

The Odyssey has monsters, witches, beautiful maidens, hilarious flirtations between Odysseus and various wise and wily women, and then in the second half of the poem he’s back in Ithaca trying to reassert himself, to find a place for himself in his homeland which has been completely taken over by his wife Penelope’s suitors. The moment when Penelope recognises Odysseus is extraordinarily moving. There’s a wonderful simile that compares her relief to the relief a sailor must feel when, shipwrecked, he grapples his way back on to dry land. And that is, of course, just what Odysseus has been doing. What I love about it is that Penelope and Odysseus are made to be equal characters. Penelope is Odysseus’s true partner. Part of me wonders why he didn’t just turn up rather than wafting around Ithaca in disguise for an awful lot of the poem, hanging out and living with his old swineherd. Why all the cloak and dagger stuff?

Well, why?

Well, the interesting thing is that throughout the poem we are constantly being reminded of what happens when you get that bit wrong. When Agamemnon goes back to Mycenae his wife Clytemnestra, who’s been living it up with her lover, kills him. That’s what happens if you don’t play it right.

The women in The Odyssey are great. Samuel Butler wrote a hilarious book called The Authoress of the Odyssey, claiming that it had to have been written by a woman because all the female characters are so fabulous and all the men so drippy. I think his argument sucks but it does say something about how great the female characters are.