Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 26, 2024

I never tire of reading, but I do get tired of reading the same plots in book after book. Readers who think (in the words of Monty Python) it’s time “for something completely different” might want to check out Glorious Exploits. The novel is funny, surprising, and poignant.

The story is set in Syracuse early in 4th century BC. Syracuse at that point was populated by Greeks, but the prose is 21st century British (“Still a gobshite, I see.”).

Toward the end of the 5th century BC, Syracuse was invaded by Athens. With the help of Sparta, Syracuse defeated the Athenians. The story begins with captured Athenians imprisoned in a quarry, where they are visited by Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters. Like most Greeks in Syracuse, Lampo and Gelon are fans of Athenian theater. They are convinced that nobody does Euripides like the Athenians. On a visit to the quarry, Gelon gets it into his head to put on a production of Medea using the Athenians to act out the play. He finds a few who have acting experience and who know the parts. Lampo is taken with a green-eyed Athenian who he believes will be perfect for the part of Jason.

Lampo is even more taken with Lyra, a slave from Lydia (a kingdom that once existed on land that is now in Turkey). Lyra is owned by the proprietor of a tavern that Lampo often visits. Lampo falls in love with Lyra and promises to one day buy her freedom. That will be a difficult promise for an unemployed potter to keep, although it gives Lampo a resolve and purpose that he previously lacked.

Equal parts comedy and tragedy, the story follows Lampo as he works with Gelon to produce Medea. The captive Athenians are slowly starving to death, but the actors are incentivized by bread and wine. As Gelon and Lampo are casting the roles, they find an Athenian who not only knows Medea, but has acted in Euripides newest play, Trojan Women. Gelon believes that Athens is doomed and decides they must save the new play by bringing it to life. To that end, they plan to produce both plays.

Their plans come to the attention of a wealthy businessman named Tuireann who is passing through Syracuse. He provides the gold that Gelon and Lempo need to purchase sets and costumes to stage the play correctly. Yet not all Syracusans are pleased that the Athenians who killed their family members during a siege of the city are being treated so well. Will the plays ever be produced in the face of such hostility?

Glorious Exploits is in equal parts a comedy and a tragedy. Euripides (we are told at the end) “was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.” Most of the story in Glorious Exploits unfolds between the invasion of Syracuse by Athens and its invasion by Carthage. During the years when Syracuse is free from invaders, Gelon and Lampo contrive to heal their wounded city with stories told by Euripides. Misfortune does indeed seem to be the human condition, particularly for slaves and captured soldiers who are starving to death in a pit. Some of them, at least, might be healed before the story ends.

The story told by Ferdia Lennon also has healing value. It is a story about the redemptive power of love and a story of the enduring power of Lampo’s rocky friendship with Gelon, but it is also the story of an unlikely friendship between Lampo and a conquered Athenian. The novel eventually becomes a story of how we should treat our enemies and whether we should think of other humans as enemies at all — at least in moments when we are not trying to kill each other.

Glorious Exploits has everything this reader could want: silliness, drama, excitement, unexpected twists, a story worth telling and lessons worth learning. The story is told in pitch-perfect prose that restores ancient Syracuse to its momentary glory. The year is young, but this is the best book I’ve read so far in 2024.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on January 24, 2023

“If there were no righteous humans, Padri used to say, the blessings of God would become completely hidden and Creation would cease to exist.” Rafael Pinto knows that righteous humans exist because he can still see stars at night. His father also told Pinto that “Heaven is a revolving wheel” and that everything around you will change if you sit still, while if you keep moving, you will never be the same. Both adages inform Pinto’s life.

The World and All That It Holds is the story of a life in motion, a life that is neither righteous nor evil. “Each and every one of us has a thousand demons at his left, and ten thousand demons at his right. What are we to do with all those demons?” The question is at the center of Pinto’s existence.

Pinto is a Bosnian who studied medicine in Vienna. Early in the novel, Pinto is in Sarajevo, where he sees the shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The shot tears Pinto away from his fantasies of the handsome cavalry officer from whom, minutes earlier, he stole a kiss in the back room of his family’s apothecary. Within weeks, Pinto and tens of thousands of other Bosnians are conscripted into the Imperial Army and deployed to Serbia. Pinto’s abbreviated medical training turns him into a battlefield doctor who watches most of his patients die.

Two years later, Pinto’s company is stuck in Galicia and Pinto is sleeping with Osman, who defends him from the soldiers “who practice the age-old custom of bullying a Jew.” They survive slaughter in Galicia before, as prisoners, they ride a train to Tashkent.

After they gain their freedom, Pinto works in a hospital and Osman joins the Cheka so he will have time to devise a plan to return to Sarajevo. They have a tacit understanding that Pinto will not ask Osman what he does when he is serving the Bolsheviks. Pinto would rather not know. Osman would rather that Pinto not know the truth about a mysterious man who is hiding in the home they share. Pinto later encounters the mystery man (now known as Moser) in Makhram and again in Shanghai. Moser will eventually write about those meetings in his memoirs.

Pinto spends the rest of the novel hoping to make his way back to Sarajevo, a seemingly foolish hope since he is stateless and has no passport. Bosnia has become Yugoslavia, a country that would not recognize his existence even if he could afford travel papers. With no other options, Pinto follows the flow of refugees. He travels to Xinjiang where Cossack marauders kill everyone in sight. He joins a caravan to travel through the Siberian desert. He spends a good part of his life in Shanghai, sometimes living on a rooftop with refugees from the Chinese part of the city when it is shelled by Japan.

The World and All That It Holds reads like a literary adventure novel, except that the adventurer is poor and powerless. He has not chosen his life and is far from the captain of his own fate. On many occasions, Pinto thinks he would welcome death. “Death is always growing inside you, like a nail growing on your soul.” Yet in his worst moments, he is told by a dead man that his time has not yet come, that he has a duty to make life better for someone who is still alive.

Pinto’s life is one of struggle. He struggles to survive. “The meaning of life is not to die.” Yet survival makes Pinto a witness to horror. He struggles with the brutality of war, with condemnation of his sexual and religious identities, with an addiction to morphine and opium. He struggles with loss and betrayal. He struggles to keep a child alive after delivering her for a mother who dies in childbirth (the first time he has seen a vagina since he dissected a cadaver during his medical training). He contemplates how the Lord creates new worlds while destroying old ones, how humans cannot fathom God’s rules.

Yet this is also a story of love. Osman is always in Pinto’s life, even when he might only a ghost or a voice in his head. Pinto loves a married Chinese man in Shanghai, unless it is the man’s opium he loves. He loves Rahela, the little girl he raises like a daughter until, against his wishes, she finds a different kind of love elsewhere. Only later does Rahela realize that it is Pinto who has always loved her, that she wasted her life by not loving Pinto enough. You’ll need to read the novel to find out whether that realization comes too late.

And it is a story of evil. Of wars that decimate the innocent. Of ethnic hatred. Of men like the American who seduces Rahela, “evil so nicely smelling, so sunny, with his combed hair and clipped nails and cleanly shaven, always taking whatever he wants from other people, ransacking their lives, as if everything and everyone belonged to him, as if everyone else was just passing through the world given to him at birth.”

Prose like the sentence quoted above permeates the novel — strong prose that propels the novel like a freight train gaining speed, the kind of prose that is needed to tell a powerful story. I could have done without the epilog (a jump to the present that purports to explain how the story came to be written), but the story that precedes it is an amazing blend of humor, tragedy, and adventure. The novel speaks a purposeful truth and, without being the least bit sentimental, it put a lump in my throat.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

First published in Great Britain in 2022; published by Orbit on August 2, 2022

During the early chapters of Eversion, I wondered whether Alastair Reynolds had departed from his career as a science fiction writer to tell a seafaring adventure story. By the midpoint, it becomes clear that the novel is not what it seems. By the last quarter, a surprising reveal brings science fiction to the forefront of the story. Kudos to Reynolds for his masterful misdirection.

The story in Eversion is told by Silas Coade. Silas has been hired as ship’s surgeon to serve on the Demeter. The ship is sailing near the coast of Norway, following a map to a structure that characters dub the Edifice. The Demeter is a sizable vessel, carrying a hundred crew members, although only few characters are significant to the story. The ship’s captain is Van Vught; the man who arranged and funded the expedition is Topolsky. Dupin is a scientist and Ramos is in charge of security. Countess Cossile is a snarky linguist/journalist who makes it her mission to annoy Silas and everyone else with her self-assured belief in her intellectual superiority. She is particularly critical of the science fiction potboiler that Silas is writing.

A character dies early in Eversion and reappears in a later chapter, no worse for the death. Other characters do not seem to notice. I thought perhaps I had lost my place in the novel and was rereading unremembered pages before the death, or that I was mistaking one character for another. But then a mast that toppled is back in its place and only one character remembers that it fell. Still later in the book, the Demeter has become a different kind of vessel and the location of the Edifice has changed. In each version of the story, the characters encounter a wrecked ship called the Europa and become angry with Topolsky for not revealing his knowledge of the vessel. Silas and Ramos eventually recall different parts of the stories that have come before, as if the memories were of dreams.

The novel’s title refers to turning a sphere inside out. Dupin is a bit obsessed with the idea of eversion. The title is apt, as the story turns itself inside out before it reaches a conclusion. As the reader grasps for hidden truths, it becomes apparent that the truth is known to Cossile, who insists that it is also known to Silas, if only he would face it. “The truth is a raw nerve” and Silas flinches and retreats whenever he touches it. But what is the truth that Silas refuses to accept? Perhaps he has been gripped by madness. Perhaps the truth will make him descend into madness, again and again. Reynolds plants clues to the truth here and there, bits of the story that don’t seem to matter until they do. The plot is both a journey toward truth and a reminder that it is difficult to accept discomforting truths about ourselves.

Reynolds builds a moral dilemma into the story, the old question of whether killing one person to save more than one other person is morally justified. Does the equation change if the killing can be accomplished with kindness? Does it change if the killer is a doctor who has sworn to do no harm? Some of the novel’s dramatic tension arises from the characters’ disagreement about how to answer that question.

The moral issue adds another layer of depth to a complex story of courage and sacrifice. Reynolds even adds an offbeat love story to the mix. Eversion is my mid-year favorite science fiction novel of 2022. I suspect it will still be my favorite at year’s end.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Published by Scribner on September 28, 2021

Anthony Doerr tells this story in multiple time frames. Each chapter begins with fragments of a story written by Antonius Diogenes, a second century storyteller. The title of Diogenes’ story translates as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The rest of the book bounces around in time. The segments are connected by Diogenes’ story. That connection reminds us of the importance of books and the ease with which, in the long stretch of time, knowledge is lost. We believe that everything will last “but that is only because of the extreme brevity of our own lives.” Cities “come and go like anthills.” “The houses of the rich burn as quick as any other.” From ancient works and the ruins of the past, we might discover lost knowledge that will help us understand how our present came into existence. We might also learn something about the universality of human experience.

Diogenes’ story tells of Aethon’s “journey to a utopian city in the sky.” The story was supposedly written on wooden slates that Diogenes discovered in Aethon’s tomb. Diogenes claimed to have transcribed the slates onto papyrus and had the transcripts delivered to his ailing niece, an entertainment designed to encourage her recovery.

Centuries later, as the Saracens prepare to sack Constantinople, a girl named Anna is ransacking a hidden trove of manuscripts, delivering them to monks who hope to find a book that contains the entire world. Anna believes Diogenes’ codex fits that description when it speaks of “a place of golden towers stacked on clouds, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots.”

North of Constantinople, Omeir was born with a facial deformity that makes his village regard him as a djinn. His grandfather cannot find it in himself to leave the baby to die. Omeir turns into a gentle child who raises and loves two oxen before he and his oxen are drafted to attack Constantinople. Omeir’s path eventually intersects Anna’s. Diogenes’ book, once important only to Anna, now becomes important to Omeir.

Zeno Ninis is a prisoner of war in Korea during the early 1950s, where he meets and falls in love with a scholar named Rex. Zeno learns root words in Greek from Rex, including a particularly telling phrase that translates as: “That’s what the gods do. They spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Seymour Stuhlman is a child in Lakeport, Idaho in the mid-2010s. Birds are losing their Lakeport habitat to developers who replace forests with parking lots. One of those birds was an owl Seymour knew as Trustyfriend. Medication is the adult answer to Seymour’s perception of the doomed world in which he lives, but Seymour has a bent for subversion that neither medication nor prison will change. His eventual purpose in life is to undo the lies that corporate America tells people who prefer a clean and cheerful world to the one they have created.

Zeno’s story collides with Seymour’s in 2020. Seymour is apparently prepared to blow up the Lakeport library as Zeno is upstairs, directing a children’s play.

Konstance lives on a generation ship making its way to a distant planet after Earth has succumbed to environmental disaster. Konstance loses herself in the generation ship’s computer, discovering Earth’s history, before she is forced into isolation to avoid a rapidly spreading contagion. Konstance’s father had a book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, translated from the Greek by Zeno Ninis. In the ship’s virtual library, she searches for information about Zeno and begins to guess the truth about her isolated existence.

Diogenes’ tale links all the characters, illustrating the reality that history has unforeseeable impacts on the future, that people who history does not recall have played their role in shaping our present. The novel’s characters are imbued with the same qualities as Aethon. They persist. They take wrong turns but eventually right their course. They stand in awe of a world they don’t understand, but they strive to gain knowledge of their place within it. They might get lost, they might lose things, but they come to understand that “sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” The characters are fighting not just to make sense of the world but to make sense of themselves.

Like his characters, Doerr’s prose is lively and surprising. He asks important questions: “Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we are young?” Why do we find it so hard to accept reality? Why do people want to conquer others when what they have is enough? Doerr gives the reader nutritious thoughts to chew upon, but he does so in the context of a story that gradually evolves from bewildering to astonishing.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Kindred by Octavia Butler

First published in 1979; anthologized by the Library of America in Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories on January 19, 2021

Kindred, Octavia Butler’s first and most widely praised novel, tells the story of a black woman who is repeatedly transported from Los Angeles in 1976 to Maryland in the years before the Civil War. Dana Franklin makes the journey each time the life of her ancestor, Rufus Weylin, is threatened. Her trips have a purpose: to save the life of Rufus, the white son of a slave owner, so that he can make a slave named Alice pregnant and begin the lineage that will eventually lead to Dana’s existence.

Dana makes about a half dozen trips to the past, one time bringing her white husband, Kevin, with her. From her perspective, some of the journeys last for months. She only returns to her own time when she experiences an intense fear of death. In the present, she realizes she has only been missing for a few hours.

In a time when people who live on the fringe continue to celebrate the Confederacy and its generals, when southern schools still teach children that the Civil War was “the war of Northern aggression,” Kindred should be — and is, in any schools — required reading. Butler’s description of slavery is vivid. The lives of slaves are depicted in the same detail as the lives of their masters, the key difference being the status of slaves as property. Butler emphasizes the ease with which their masters accept their entitlement to use their property as they wish. Slaves have no right to refuse orders, whether to labor in the fields or sleep with the master. Disobedience is punished with the whip. More severe punishments are inflicted on slaves who try to run away. The most troublesome slaves — those who won’t be broken — are sold to Southern states where life will be even worse. Education of slaves is prohibited because it might encourage them to think of themselves as equal to whites. Yet many whites are also poorly educated; Rufus can barely read.

Kindred is not just an indictment of slavery. Butler explores the economic and social forces that motivated the South to rebel rather than recognize that black people were entitled to the same rights as white people. Rufus is not an entirely evil man, although he is not a good man. He loves Alice but, after he buys her, he feels he has the right to rape her — an act he regrets only in its aftermath. He is more kind to Dana than he is to his slaves but rescinds the kindness when he feels a need to punish her. He struggles with whether he should free the children he fathers with Alice. Rufus is the son of a man who values slaves only for their ability to work and to breed children that he can sell. Rufus has not fallen far from the tree but progress in American history has been incremental. Rufus is Butler’s example of a white man who has taken the first baby steps toward attitudinal change.

When Kevin is stuck in the past after Dana returns to the present, Dana worries that the intervening years before they reunite may have altered Kevin’s view of race. That fear is a product of Dana’s understanding that society shapes perceptions and that resisting the pressure of racial peers to see the world from their perspective requires strength and courage. That understanding helps Dana fight to retain her identity when slaves mock her for dressing like a man (she wears pants) and talking like a white person. Yet she can’t do much to help the slaves with whom she lives — she understands the boundaries she must not cross — because the scant protection she receives by posing as Kevin’s property won’t save her from brutality if she tries to force twentieth century beliefs upon eighteenth century slaveowners.

The complexity of Dana’s character is also illustrated by the moral choice she must make when Alice — who was once a free woman — is prepared to die rather than continue living as Rufus’ mate. Dana can well understand that feeling, but if Alice dies without giving birth to the child who will be Dana’s ancestor, Dana will never be born. She encourages Alice to stay with Rufus not just to save Alice’s life, but for the more selfish purpose of assuring her own survival.

The Trump administration was justly criticized for advocating a sanitized version of American history that it characterized as “patriotic.” The curriculum advocated by Trump's Department of Education surely has no place for a book that reveals historical truth as effectively as Kindred. Americans can’t expect to move past racial division until every child understands that slavery wasn't just another form of employment. Flying the Confederate flag, memorializing generals who fought to maintain the institution of slavery, and whitewashing American history are not the acts of patriots. An education grounded in American exceptionalism rather than the truth of America's past is founded on dishonesty and exclusion. Every student — and every adult — who gets a sense of the true meaning of slavery by reading Kindred will have a deeper understanding of how racial division continues to be shaped by dehumanizing attitudes that were widespread in the years before the Civil War.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED