Book of the week

MYTHOS:

THE GREEK MYTHS RETOLD STEPHEN FRY MICHAEL JOSEPH, $37

Every generation retells the Greek myths to suit themselves, and Stephen Fry, who needs little introduction, retells them for us yet again in Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold.

Fry takes a carefully selected handful of the more picturesque and quaintly aesthetic tales of the canon, and embroiders them in his trademark combination of sardonic English wit and ironic understatement. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

One of the chief charms of the book, aside from Fry’s prose, is the way he manages to contemporise many of the messages and themes, even if, at times, he spins a little too hard.

Hesiod’s Theogony (contemporary with Homer, who doesn’t get a look in) is polished off in the first section, coming across more as a light entertainment parody than the cosmic mysteries of the gods and their origins.

The Homeric Hymns to Demeter and Hermes get a similar treatment, and the story of Cupid and Psyche makes an appearance from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. The latter lends itself well to Fry’s touch, being a literary fairy tale to begin with.

Fry’s apparent model, as well as primary source, is the Roman poet Ovid, who, in the reign of Augustus took the stories of Greece, ancient even then, and polished them up and padded them out with literary flourishes for the sophisticated tastes of his contemporaries, resulting in the long poem Metamorphoses about gods turning themselves and others into various things. These days it requires a trigger warning.

The problem, however, with Fry’s understated public-school drollery, is it tends to reduce everything to twee stereotypes and modern trivia.

Artemis, goddess of the hunt and wild, becomes a Betjemen, jolly hockey sticks type. Kronos, titan progenitor of the gods, is a sort of emo Hamlet-cumMorrissey. Hera, queen of the gods, is a cross between a Wooster aunt and the Queen of Hearts. Olympus is surprisingly middle class.

Spelling conventions are a muddle of Greek and Latin, and dreadful liberties are taken with characterisation and interpretation, but it’s all still good fun.

Just as Disney bowdlerised the Grimm brothers and Charles Perrault, who had already edited the original European folktales for the sensibilities of their respective times, Fry’s narrative mannerisms obscure that behind the marble columns and well-turned hexameters of his urbane source material lie the raw and bloody archetypes of Bronze Age religion.

It’s a tame and sentimental nostalgia for the classical world as painted by Lord Leighton, spiced with arch modern knowingness, and anything modern tastes might find objectionable glossed over. As Sappho once wrote, if you’re squeamish, don’t poke the rubble.

That said, an enjoyable romp for summer reading, and you will certainly come away better informed about these legends and how they echo through the ages.