Review of Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, pub. Fig Tree 2024
Gelon says that’s what the best plays do. If they’re true enough, you’ll recognize it even if it all seems mad at first, and this is why we give a shit about Troy, though for all we know, it was just some dream of Homer’s, and I walk towards this green soul river, and for a moment it’s like I’m going home.
412 BC, and the surviving Athenian prisoners from the disastrous Sicilian Expedition are starving in the quarries of Syracuse. Our narrator is Lampo, a young Syracusan potter like his best friend Gelon. But Gelon is also a fan of the theatre, particularly of the Athenian playwright Euripides, and he conceives a fantastic plan; he and Lampo, using the prisoners as actors, will stage two plays, the Medea and The Women of Troy, in the quarry itself.
‘That’s why we have to do it,’ Gelon says with feeling. ‘You’re right, they’re doomed, and in a few months, they’ll be gone. With the war, it might be years before we ever see another Athenian play in Syracuse. Some people are saying when Athens falls, and it has to fall, the Spartans will just burn it to the ground. There might never be another Athenian play again!’ The cup cracks in his hand, and the wine splashes on the ground. ‘For all we know, those in the quarries are all that’s left of Athenian theatre, at least as far as Syracuse is concerned.’ He stops and looks down at his arm where he cut himself, scanning it intensely as if the words he needed might be found there. ‘And it’s not just Medea. The Athenians told me that before they left Athens, Euripides wrote a new play. A play about Troy. About the women at Troy after it’s fallen. No one’s seen it in Sicily. It’s a whole new Euripides. And we’re going to do them both. Do Medea, and The Trojan Women. See, we can’t let them disappear. We have to -’ ‘Have to what?’ says Alekto, her voice gentler. ‘Keep them alive and put on the play.’
These two plays have been carefully chosen to make the novel’s point. Both illustrate a constant theme in Euripides: how suffering can either ennoble people or degrade them to brutes, depending on character and circumstance. Medea is cruelly treated and driven by anger, loss and bitterness to commit an atrocity in her turn. In Women of Troy, Hekabe, whose suffering is even greater, manages somehow to rise above it and even to find one source of comfort:
“Yet, had not heaven cast down our greatness and engulfed
All in the earth’s depths, Troy would be a name unknown,
Our agony unrecorded, and those songs unsung
Which we shall give to poets of a future age.” (Trs. Philip Vellacott)
Gelon echoes this when encouraging his ragged, shackled cast:
“How many will come? I can’t say, but we’ll know soon enough. I believe you’re going to show them something they’ll never forget. When they leave here later today, the few or many will be changed, and whatever happens in the future, Athens will be remembered, and you will be a part of that remembrance.” (This speech, incidentally, is the only reason I can think of why Hekabe is, throughout the novel, called by the Latin form of her name, which Euripides did not use; maybe Lennon wanted the echo of “What’s Hecuba to him?”)
Syracusans have good reason to hate the Athenians, and many who have lost kin to the war still do. But when in the second play the “dead” body of the child Astyanax is brought onstage, Lampo sees a strange thing happen: “I can hear sobbing now. Fishermen with faces craggy as the quarry rocks are snivelling. Aristos too. Even the prisoners weep. It’s the maddest thing. ’Cause for the briefest moment, Syracusans and Athenians have blended into a single chorus of grief for this make-believe.”
The power of fiction is real, and believable here, the more so as it is not exaggerated. There are people too low, too ignorant and too plain mean to be uplifted by it. But when it does work, it is transcendent, as when a border guard who saw the play shows mercy to his enemies: “Gelon frowns, but it’s like the guard’s lantern has left a bit of its light in Gelon’s eyes; his cheeks, though still dark and bruised, are brighter than before”. And Lampo, inexpertly playing an aulos, makes a comparison with the rats in the quarry:
“of course, you couldn’t really call what I’m doing playing - but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren’t just rats, they’re everything in the world that’s broken. They’re things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to. They’re the Athenians burning Hyccara, and the Syracusans chucking those Athenians into the quarry. Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that’s us, I say to myself, that’s us giving it a go, it’s us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it’s kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it’s decency.”
It will be clear by now that the Syracusans of the novel speak with distinct Dublin accents - and why not; Sicily is after all an island both menaced and attracted by a stronger mainland neighbour. Anyway it works; “’How do we promote this?’ ‘We tell people.’ ‘Grand so.’ And like that, we get stuck into promotion.” It also now and then enables Lampo to give a curiously contemporary feel to the proceedings:
“There are a few aristos in the corner, rolling dice and making too much noise. Their cloaks are the brightest things in the bar, and their perfume blends with the odours of fish and fresh paint, and the result is something weird and new. I don’t like it. Sure, Dismas’ was a kip, but it was our kip. Too much money’s flooding into this city, and it’s losing something, though perhaps that’s just what a man feels when he can’t see what he’s won. Thirty years of age, and I live with my ma. Not what I’d planned for.”
This is a powerfully moving, sometimes exhilarating novel. It is also intermittently funny, because our narrator has a wry way of seeing and phrasing things - “I fancy some Catanian, but I know Lyra doesn’t like red, so I also grab an Italian white the vintner says is ‘causing quite the stir’. It certainly causes a stir in my pockets, for a great deal of coin leaps up and out of them at purchase.” Many reviews I’ve seen seem to stress this angle, which I think is a mistake on their part, for at root this novel’s theme is deadly serious; namely how art can uplift people and make them want to be something more than they are. It’s certainly the most moving and impressive novel I have read since George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo.
The novel’s coda echoes what must have been the inspiration behind it; the story in Plutarch that some Athenian prisoners managed to escape and reach home because they could recite Euripides to the theatre-mad Syracusans. The last word is with that playwright’s major-domo, who reflects that “his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story”.