‘Glorious Exploits’ mines classical history for laughs

Best friends Lampo and Gelon are potters by trade, but their souls are filled with poetry. It’s 412 B.C. and the city of Syracuse doesn’t know what hit it when these two hatch the best worst idea: They’ll put on a play using the Athenian prisoners of war who are starving to death down in the rock quarry.

If the googly eyes on the cover didn’t make it apparent, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel “Glorious Exploits” is hilarious. Never before has history been such a riot.

The book is crass, quick-witted and dialogue-heavy, making it a quick read. Dublin native Lennon infuses the story with a delightfully Irish lilt, complete with very Irish cursing, that gives the whole thing a kind of bizarre yet familiar approachability. The author has also applied his deep interest and knowledge in classical history to give us exactly the context needed to set the stage for the epic tale he’ll tell.

While I’m sure history buffs will find extra layers of entertainment, rest assured that even for someone like me who has never had much interest in Greek or Roman stories, it’s still a hoot.

“Glorious Exploits” is a story largely built as if on happenstance. The directors-in-the-making stumble on children playing in the street with valuable armor they found, which Lampo and Gelon can then sell to fund their project. Later, they come across an old man singing for money whose story strikes Gelon deeply but that Lampo sees only as a story, driving a wedge between the two.

But their friendship is stronger than this. Watching them grow with the project’s progression is deeply gratifying. And relieving. If at first Lampo seems almost unbearably awful, fret not, because it gets better.

The main characters are sympathetic and their goals admirable — certainly feeding the Athenians is humanitarian, even if gruffly so — but before long I found myself also rooting for their success in every venture that branches off from the play, from Gelon’s search for happiness to Lampo’s courting of Lyra, the new girl down at their favorite watering hole.

All told, the project is so much more than putting on a couple of Euripides tragedies; it’s lifegiving, and it challenges the barriers between “us” and “them.”

I never thought I could be so enraptured reading a book describe a play performance — especially a tragedy I didn’t know. Yet Lennon has infused the pages with nervous anticipation that’s closer to reading a thriller than a historical comedy.

“Glorious Exploits” is a celebration of storytelling lavishing in the emotional power of the arts, and one that’s especially apt in dealing with the fallout of the Peloponnesian War at a time when, in our present reality, fighting has left cities in rubble and millions of people facing starvation. Lennon offers a window past the fog of messy politics to view these tragedies with empathy.

By Ferdia Lennon (Holt, $27) “Glorious Exploits”