By Chris Floyd
Zachary Mason's remarkable new novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, is based on a grain of fact. Before the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey were crystallized and canonized in the books of Homer sometime in the 8th century B.C., various (and often conflicting) tales of the Trojan War and its heroes had floated around in various forms for hundreds of years. Some of these variants survive in fragments of other ancient works, like ghostly echoes of alternative universes. Mason's intriguing fictional conceit is that he is translating one of these: a "pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus" which "contains forty-four concise variations on Odysseus's story."
And that is what he proceeds to offer us: 44 chapters, 44 alternative (and conflicting) universes, where some tale of Odysseus -- or, occasionally, the whole arc of his life -- is presented in sharply etched, psychologically penetrating modern prose. (No faux-epic stylizations.) Sometimes there are gods and magic; sometimes Odysseus lives in a world of the grimmest realism.
It's not my intention here to give a literary review of the book. I just wanted to highlight two passages which seem to me to have some particular relevance for our current political situation. Both come from a chapter called "The Iliad of Odysseus." This is the longest chapter in the book, and one of the most "realistic." As Odysseus puts it toward the end of the section: "There are, as far as I have seen, and I have seen much, no gods, no spirits and no such thing as witches, but I seem to be the only one who knows it."
