I'll have to listen again to the first part to see how effectively Fry weaves the storylines of Paris, Achilles, Helen, and the city of Troy itself my first impression is that he (perhaps inevitably) succumbs to the Ariostesque device of "but let's leave X here and get back to Y, whom we left." I'm afraid this might also depend on Audible's odd division of chapters, since you have several short chunks at the beginning and the end, and then two major 4:20:00 parts in the middle, anf it gets harder to see the structure there (hence the four stars). *SPOILER ALERT* Unlike in "Mythos" and "Heroes", telling the story of the Trojan War involves presenting a host of characters that eventually end up being in the same place and in the same time. So, if you need to learn about the mythology of the Trojan War, maybe no one can do it better than Fry, but I am not a convert to appreciating the greatness of this ancient literature. I imagine that Shakespeare fans would also think Shakespeare did it better. But I can think of so many modern great books that do it better: Les Miserables, A Tale of Two Cities, and so many other great works do it better. I know that these stories are part of the canon and are part of our vocabulary and so I took my medicine. and no one has ever done it better than Homer. At the every end, in his appendix, Fry says that these stories show all the human weaknesses: envy, pride, lust, etc. There are books about war (War and Peace, Stalingrad are two of the best) that can evoke all the emotions and be real, presenting real characters who are developed with all the human flaws. So much hyperbole: the most beautiful, the most valuable, the most powerful. Maybe no war has a really good reason, but this is totally absurd, and they know it. But I wasn’t impressed with the Odyssey and the Iliad in high school, and though 50+ years later I have come to appreciate many books that I didn’t enjoy so much in high school (Dickens, whom I now love, for example), this has not improved with (my) age.
Stephen Fry is a delight to listen to, and I doubt anyone could have done a better job with the story of the Trojan War and all the myths that accompany it. I said that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” in my review of one of the previous volumes. A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down
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