osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2025-04-03 09:37 am
osprey_archer) wrote2025-04-03 09:37 am
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Book Review: Glorious Exploits
One of the quotes on the back cover of Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits compares the book to Mary Renault, and this is both accurate and wildly misleading.
It’s accurate in that Glorious Exploits is a book with a tragic sensibility set in an ancient Greece that is unabashedly alien to modern culture in many respects. This is a world where slavery exists and you can stick prisoners of war in a quarry for two years and that’s just the way life is.
It’s misleading in that Glorious Exploits is not particularly gay. It also stars two out-of-work potters who speak like modern-day Dubliners, and it’s hilarious, which with all due respect to Mary Renault is not a word I would apply to any of her work. In fact, I picked up the book because “production of Medea starring the Athenian prisoners in the quarries at Syracuse” sounded like a romp, which it is, although in retrospect it’s curious that the premise seemed so irresistibly funny given that the Athenian prisoners have been slowly starving for two years.
Anyway. Athenians in the quarry. Our hero Lampo’s best friend Gelon is mad for Euripides, so sometimes Lampo and Gelon go down to the quarry with olives, which they’ll give to any prisoners who can trade lines from Medea. One day, after local man Biton comes down to the quarry to kill some prisoners (which he does sometimes to avenge his son who was tortured to death by the Athenians during the invasion, you know how it is), Lampo and Gelon discover that one of the prisoners was an actor back in Athens who knows not only the whole of Medea but also Euripides’ new play The Trojan Women...
Well, says Gelon, for all we know Athens has been burned to the ground by Sparta by now. This may be our only chance to save Euripides latest and greatest work! And Lampo, pleased to see Gelon so excited about anything, because he’s been damn depressed since his son died and his wife left him (unrelated to the invasion, sometimes life is just tough), goes along with this mad scheme, which gets madder and madder as they find a producer (a British merchant who keeps a god in a tub on his boat? Might be magical himself?), and hire a costume designer, and rehearse their cast, and also Lampo has fallen for the slave girl at the local bar, as you do…
And it looks like they’re actually going to do this thing!
And they do! And all of Syracuse comes to watch the double billing of Medea and The Trojan Women! And then at the end Biton shows up to murder the actors because he’s SO furious that everyone has forgotten how these dudes CAME to SYRACUSE to MURDER us ALL and TORTURED MY SON TO DEATH and now you’re just all sitting here WATCHING THEM PUT ON A PLAY???
Everyone, afterward: poor Biton, he’s really been so unstable since his son was tortured to death by the Athenians.
One thing the book does really well is this balance between “the poor Athenian prisoners trapped in the quarry slowly starving to death” and “these poor Athenian prisoners invaded Syracuse to murder all the men, rape all the women, and carry all the children off into slavery, so maybe don’t feel TOO bad for them.” It’s very uncomfortable! Thank you Ferdia Lennon!
A few of the cast survived, and the maybe-magical producer who possibly has a god in a tub on his boat offers to help Lampo help them escape if Lampo can get them across the island. Lampo tries to recruit Gelon to help with the prison break, Gelon (extremely depressed again) refuses, Lampo shouts at him that has he ever considered that all the bad thoughts he thinks about himself, which he tells himself are the voice of his depression, are actually true??
Which is also extremely uncomfortable, because unlike many of the bad things people do in this book, this one is 100% relatable as a thing that any human in any time and any place might do. Lampo is doing his best and his best is often awful but it’s still his best.
They rescue a few of the Athenians and get them on the magical British merchant’s boat. The magical British merchant gives Lampo the money he needs to buy his slave girlfriend’s freedom. Awkwardly, the magical British merchant has also rescued Lampo’s slave girlfriend (probably because she sings tragic songs beautifully, not sheer philanthropy), which he doesn’t mention to Lampo, so Lampo gets back to Syracuse with his three hundred drachmas and she’s gone. So he throws the three hundred drachmas into the quarry.
And now it’s years later and he’s telling his story for someone else to write down as they wait for Syracuse to be invaded, yet again, I think not by the Athenians but I don’t remember, but does it really matter who is going to burn down the town and murder you? Lampo has been told to flee, but he’s too old, he’s going to stay here by Gelon's grave and tell his story and remember.
It’s accurate in that Glorious Exploits is a book with a tragic sensibility set in an ancient Greece that is unabashedly alien to modern culture in many respects. This is a world where slavery exists and you can stick prisoners of war in a quarry for two years and that’s just the way life is.
It’s misleading in that Glorious Exploits is not particularly gay. It also stars two out-of-work potters who speak like modern-day Dubliners, and it’s hilarious, which with all due respect to Mary Renault is not a word I would apply to any of her work. In fact, I picked up the book because “production of Medea starring the Athenian prisoners in the quarries at Syracuse” sounded like a romp, which it is, although in retrospect it’s curious that the premise seemed so irresistibly funny given that the Athenian prisoners have been slowly starving for two years.
Anyway. Athenians in the quarry. Our hero Lampo’s best friend Gelon is mad for Euripides, so sometimes Lampo and Gelon go down to the quarry with olives, which they’ll give to any prisoners who can trade lines from Medea. One day, after local man Biton comes down to the quarry to kill some prisoners (which he does sometimes to avenge his son who was tortured to death by the Athenians during the invasion, you know how it is), Lampo and Gelon discover that one of the prisoners was an actor back in Athens who knows not only the whole of Medea but also Euripides’ new play The Trojan Women...
Well, says Gelon, for all we know Athens has been burned to the ground by Sparta by now. This may be our only chance to save Euripides latest and greatest work! And Lampo, pleased to see Gelon so excited about anything, because he’s been damn depressed since his son died and his wife left him (unrelated to the invasion, sometimes life is just tough), goes along with this mad scheme, which gets madder and madder as they find a producer (a British merchant who keeps a god in a tub on his boat? Might be magical himself?), and hire a costume designer, and rehearse their cast, and also Lampo has fallen for the slave girl at the local bar, as you do…
And it looks like they’re actually going to do this thing!
And they do! And all of Syracuse comes to watch the double billing of Medea and The Trojan Women! And then at the end Biton shows up to murder the actors because he’s SO furious that everyone has forgotten how these dudes CAME to SYRACUSE to MURDER us ALL and TORTURED MY SON TO DEATH and now you’re just all sitting here WATCHING THEM PUT ON A PLAY???
Everyone, afterward: poor Biton, he’s really been so unstable since his son was tortured to death by the Athenians.
One thing the book does really well is this balance between “the poor Athenian prisoners trapped in the quarry slowly starving to death” and “these poor Athenian prisoners invaded Syracuse to murder all the men, rape all the women, and carry all the children off into slavery, so maybe don’t feel TOO bad for them.” It’s very uncomfortable! Thank you Ferdia Lennon!
A few of the cast survived, and the maybe-magical producer who possibly has a god in a tub on his boat offers to help Lampo help them escape if Lampo can get them across the island. Lampo tries to recruit Gelon to help with the prison break, Gelon (extremely depressed again) refuses, Lampo shouts at him that has he ever considered that all the bad thoughts he thinks about himself, which he tells himself are the voice of his depression, are actually true??
Which is also extremely uncomfortable, because unlike many of the bad things people do in this book, this one is 100% relatable as a thing that any human in any time and any place might do. Lampo is doing his best and his best is often awful but it’s still his best.
They rescue a few of the Athenians and get them on the magical British merchant’s boat. The magical British merchant gives Lampo the money he needs to buy his slave girlfriend’s freedom. Awkwardly, the magical British merchant has also rescued Lampo’s slave girlfriend (probably because she sings tragic songs beautifully, not sheer philanthropy), which he doesn’t mention to Lampo, so Lampo gets back to Syracuse with his three hundred drachmas and she’s gone. So he throws the three hundred drachmas into the quarry.
And now it’s years later and he’s telling his story for someone else to write down as they wait for Syracuse to be invaded, yet again, I think not by the Athenians but I don’t remember, but does it really matter who is going to burn down the town and murder you? Lampo has been told to flee, but he’s too old, he’s going to stay here by Gelon's grave and tell his story and remember.
no subject
Everything I have heard about Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits has sounded a lot more like Tom Holt's Goatsong (1989) and The Walled Orchard (1990).
no subject
no subject
Understood. The Holt novels are also about Athenian theater and the disaster of Syracuse and very funny to read while also very not, so I feel there could have been a readymade fandom overlap!