Glorious Exploits
Ferdia Lennon
Henry Holt and Co, 2024

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et after Athens’ failed invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon is narrated by Lampas, an unemployed thirty-year-old Syracusan with a clubfoot. Laid off from the pottery factory, he spends his days accompanying his best friend Gelon to the local limestone quarry, now an open air prison camp where a few hundred defeated Athenian soldiers are slowly starving to death.

Gelon, haunted by the loss of his wife and child—she ran off after they lost the child to disease, proving there’s still plenty of tragedy outside of the war—goes to the quarry in search of snippets of Athenian tragedy, which he’s mad for, and the quarry, being full of Athenians, is a jackpot. Some of the soldiers have acting experience, and Gelon decides to use them to stage a production of Euripides’ Medea, with Lampas joining him as co-director. Gelon and Lampas pay for the expenses—mostly they need food to keep the soldiers alive, but also set decorations and theatre masks—by selling the hoplite armour taken from some Athenian corpses discovered just off the side of the road.

Everyone suffers in this ancient world full of slavery, disease, violence, and lost loved ones. And the suffering is vivid: anyone can come up with a legless beggar singing for change, but there’s something special, I think, about having the beggar actually sinking in the mud during a heavy rain.

Everyone suffers, but not everyone suffers equally. All social relations are explicitly hierarchical here, and the humiliation that comes from being reminded you’re beneath a prosperous cousin with a stall in the marketplace or a snotty aristo kid slumming in your quarter goes a long way to explaining why characters sometimes react suddenly with what might otherwise seem like unprovoked casual violence: there’s only so much humiliation a person can take. And yet life goes on, and there’s tenderness, too: Gelon and Lampas are led to the hoplite corpses by a group of war orphans, and together they hold an impromptu and rather moving funeral for the Athenians, even though it’s the Athenians who took the orphans’ fathers.

The days of historical fiction filled with artificially stilted language, inevitably more Victorian than whatever era the author is trying to evoke, are coming to a close—and thank the gods for that. Still, the question of how people spoke to one another in the past is a central question that any such novel has to address. Do you create a ‘shadow tongue’ using Old English words and modern syntax, as Paul Kingsnorth did for The Wake? Or do you forgo that and use internet-inflected slang as Maria Dahvana Headley did for her Beowulf? Lennon opts for Irish-accented English, Hiberno-English I guess is the term, and it works. These are, after all, working class characters speaking to each other in the local vernacular of an island that’s been subject to a harsh attempt at colonization from a neighbour. Still, the intentional rhyming of ‘cod’ and ‘god’ is a little off-putting, a jarring misstep that reminds us the two languages don’t actually overlap so neatly. Likewise, the continual mention of pockets brought to mind a Latin teacher I once had, an expert on the costumes of antiquity, who would rage whenever she came across a mention of pockets in historical fiction about Rome.

On the other hand, the novel’s language regarding the theatre veers closer to Hollywood, and while the back of my mind was trying to check all this against whatever history I half remembered (did Ancient Greek Plays really have producers? Or casting sessions?), it ends up working in the context of the novel, and it’s easy to just roll with it. Sure, there was probably some complex Greek technical term for a stagehand, but calling the orphans production assistants works fine, too.

At any rate, all historical fiction has to pull off a bit of a bait and switch, speculating about the past by subbing in a little of something from the present, and for what it’s worth, Glorious Exploits does a better job at this sleight of hand than César Aira’s Fulgentius, the other recent novel about amateur stage production in the ancient world. Here it’s working class life that’s subbed in, which manages to find a good mix between the familiar—performing banter in a tavern—and the alien: the novel’s love plot involves Lampas falling for the slave girl who works as a barmaid in his favourite tavern, which of course raises a set of ethical questions that the novel then has to weave its way around without turning anyone into a 19th-century abolitionist or having the reader close the book in disgust. For the most part, it works.

The Athenian plays are only described in snippets, and when Gelon and Lampas decide to make the play a double bill they cut off the beginning of Euripides’ recently released Trojan Women, because even the Athenian actors can’t remember it, and yet their passion always shines through. Gelon and Lampas experience a real catharsis from these plays, and so, vicariously, do we. It explains why they’re ready to move on from the war and get on with their lives: because catharsis is a purging of emotions. But Greek tragedy isn’t distributed evenly, Lampas points out Syracuse is a bit of a backwater in that regard. And even though Syracuse has prospered—new buildings leave the city unrecognizable, and tour guides make coin showing foreigners the spot where Athenian general Nicias was beheaded—there’s still a hateful, reactionary feeling popular with the locals, and they’re not content with letting the Athenians starve to death. Ironically, the people who could most benefit from Athenian tragedy are those least likely to want to watch it—now that’s tragedy.

This all erupts, of course, at the first performance of the play. And it would’ve been better to let the novel end there, or slightly thereafter. What comes afterwards is just melodrama, and while I have nothing against melodrama—I live for certain kinds of it—it’s not going to hit as hard as a well-crafted piece of real tragedy, real drama. The Irish merchant-turned-producer feels a little too much like a mysterious recurring villain in a fantasy series (though I’m still thinking about his god in a fishtank), the prison break feels out of character for those involved (and I’m surprised the Athenians didn’t try to pull something off themselves), and while the fate of Lyra the slave girl comes off as fitting and inevitable it’s also somewhat lacking. It’s revealed, Lampas reacts, and then the story just ends.

Still, the novel is worthwhile, and it’s easy to see this becoming a staple for anyone looking to wrap their head around Greek theatre.