Dropped Books

While I had a successful reading summer, getting through a modest 12-15 books, it has ended on a low note. I recently had to retire a book before completion. This, to me, is disastrous. The book was Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. I have read some of Graves' other works including I, Claudius, the sequel Claudius the God, and some of his brilliant poetry. Overall I find him engaging, spritely, and emotionally complex - just the sort of qualities that tend to get my attention. However, Homer's Daughter was a wreck. The premise, in the form of a question, is quite simple: what if The Odyssey wasn't in fact written by Homer, but instead by a young noblewoman from Sicily during early antiquity? Beyond the premise, I can't think of much else worthy of mentioning because its execution barely touched upon the intrigue articulated in the premise.

How, I ask myself, could something so promising become so ass-boring? (Ass-boring is of course a highly technical critical term involving all sorts of detailed criticisms relating to characterization, plot, style, pacing, etc.) Homer's Daughter fails to be readable on any level. It's connections to The Odyssey are sophomoric and quite a bit silly to boot. And the plot is so contrived, building as it does on a series of random selections from The Odyssey, that each chapter hits like a wave of bilious bitch-slap. Ouch! And the most distressing fact of all is that I've been waiting to read this book for nearly 3 years. The letdown of course was all the more painful since I all but devoured an historical novel by Bernard Cornwell post-haste. Cornwell, while lacking in the literary credentials of Graves, does all the small writerly things well, things like characterization, plot, style, and pacing.

I believe that narrative, far from reflecting our lives, is a survival mechanism that is simultaneously simplistic yet defining in that it brings order out of chaos and allows our communal minds to coalesce around shared experiences that are too often denied our waking lives. So, thank you Bernard Cornwell, thank you for being entertaining and engaging and salvific when I lost myself in the hands of one whose job it was to redeem my wayward soul. I haven't made it back to dry land, but I'm clinging tightly to a stout board, there is an island in the distance, and I am paddling slowly but surely in its direction.