Heroes

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Continuing on the Stephen fry bender, this week saw me curled up on the couch reacquainting myself with those most fabulous of timeless tales, those of the Ancient Greek heroes. A brilliant collection of magic, murder, misdeeds, and meanders, Heroes is a wonderful continuation of Fry’s loving exploration into the ancient world while also being a delightfully exciting and entertaining examination of some of the most classic tropes and genres of storytelling.

With the loving nurture of man by Prometheus being mused over by the Gods on Olympus and the titan on a rocky hillside being continuously (and torturously) devoured, mankind is fast taking their place in the world, indeed they are making it their own. A time when the Gods no longer reign seems inevitable, as people like Heracles, Orpheus, Jason, Atalanta, and Theseus run about performing incredible feats of strength, wit, and will. With heroes like these, who need deities?

Perhaps what I adore most about this book and its predecessor, Mythos, is that they are both wonderful, fresh, and modern retellings of some of the oldest and classic stories, and the books really show Fry’s love for the subject. Mythos and Heroes are more than just a collection of sparkling bedtime stories, they are a celebration of theatre, performance, and cultural arts. Fry injects the tales with fun little pops of his own opinions and jokes, giving them new life, as well as footnotes that don’t just explain how to pronounce some of the more confusing Greek names, but highlight just how much these myths and stories have influenced theatre, poetry, and the arts over the centuries.

Image credit: AXSChat

The stories themselves he retells with that lovely, intelligent and sophisticated wit that he’s got, which just makes everything sparkle and another thing that I really love about these books is that they so beautifully tell the well-known stories (e.g. that of Heracles), as well as a number of the smaller and less well-known ones (like that of Atalanta, of whom I have never heard).

Heroes is the perfect way to while away the hours in a delightful, voyeuristic swirl of excitement, danger, suspense, and hilarity. I would highly recommend both of Fry’s books on the myths of Ancient Greece, as they tick all the boxes for a truly wonderful reading experience.

Heroes is the follow-up book to Mythos, written by Stephen Fry. An exciting anthology of tales, it was published by Michael Joseph in 2018.