Stephen Fry finds himself among the rare class of actors that doesn’t just talk the talk, but can also walk the proverbial walk. Benedict Cumberbatch, for instance, would struggle to gather clues like a real detective, and Hugh Laurie belongs nowhere near a set of scalpels, but Fry’s role as host of QI was something he earned. As far as comparable game show hosts go, only Ken Jennings can really compare in both reputation and charisma after his successful trial-by-fire in the episodes of Jeopardy that he hosted after Alex Trebek’s death almost 4 years ago. Since his tenure as host of QI ended, Fry has sought to maintain his reputation by publishing a trilogy of books on Greek mythology. The first one, Mythos, was recently rereleased as an illustrated edition, so I thought it prudent to look at it and assess how well it meets the needs of the modern reader.
The most important threshold for any Greek mythology book in the modern era is to surpass the accessibility of the extant resources, because hoping to outshine Hesiod or Ovid is a laughable goal. Even in English prose, it would be a struggle to outdo what Graves did with The Greek Myths. The true point of comparison, then, is whether it is accessible to the youth. D’Aulaires is aimed at very young children, and Bullfinch and Hamilton both verge on being outdated. That target “young adult” audience will indeed find themselves captivated by Fry’s retellings of the myths at hand. Some of the interesting minutiae get overlooked; despite the opening chapter being cribbed from Hesiod, 9 muses are listed instead of his 4. It’s unreasonable to expect these kinds of books to touch on every detail; Fry does a good job of separating the tantalizing and attention-grabbing scholarship from the intriguing but in-the-weeds interpretations. When it comes to Ovid in particular, one could easily spend hours talking about a handful of lines, but that won’t necessarily captivate the next generation of readers.
Fry structures each story in a way that benefits those with diminished attention spans. The bulk of each myth is written in dialogue. Fry even omits the typical linguistic markers for discourse (e.g. “said,” “muttered,” “shouted”) and trusts the reader to keep track of who says what in order to keep these sections as tight as possible. That way, the individual biographies of each deity that separate the myth retellings receive as much room to breathe in regular prose as possible. The modern student often gets swamped with different obligations to friends, school and family, so having around one heading per page (in addition to the full-page art) can help with a sense of accomplishment for lapsed readers as well. Ovid’s Metamorphoses by nature can be difficult to put down because each story flows into the next. In Fry’s Mythos, the reader can easily stop at any point and be able to identify a handful of facts that they learned about mythology. Publications like Kindle Vella and the Imprint app have also begun to adapt to these reading habits. Another trick that Fry utilizes to keep people engaged is that the first time any mythological character gets mentioned in the narrative, their name appears in all capital letters. Mentally, this helps the reader to know whether they ought to remember who that figure is, or whether they ought to anticipate reading about them in the coming sections. It’s a neat little trick that caters well to the world we unfortunately now live in.
Pop culture is unfortunately in a weird place. There’s such a glut of media in the zeitgeist right now that it’s difficult to tell what the next generations will recognize and what will be lost on them. Comparing Kronos to Hannibal Lecter, for example, could be a safe bet considering its Oscar wins, but would one do the same for 1990’s Dances with Wolves or 1992’s Unforgiven? For a 60 year old man, Fry does do a remarkably good job avoiding some easy pitfalls with recency bias in the book, but even across the five years since its original release there are signs of aging. The extent of Terpsichore’s biography is one reference to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Things may be different across the pond for sure, but even Holy Grail is beginning to fade from the public eye over here in America. Late into the book, for example, Fry makes an oblique reference comparing Pyramus and Thisbe to Sue Ellen and J.R. from the CBS soap opera Dallas, whose initial run ended the same year I was born. I’m not entirely convinced that he even needed to name another pair of star-crossed lovers to make his point, but there have been hundreds of stories since then that would have been more present in the minds of the readers. If the example had to be that old, even Jack and Rose from Titanic would have proven to have more longevity. This is probably the most egregious example, but even the negligible ones only serve to distract from the rest of the work.
Because this edition is the illustrated version, it’s worth talking about the unique art style. It belongs somewhere in that gray area between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, but the general “vibe” to the pieces is better described as belonging to the 1920s and 1930s. It’s got a look that I associate with Chicago and NYC. I think it’s incredibly vital to the work as a whole to pick something so stylized and particular that’s outside the living memory. What I mean by that is that the number of people alive today that experienced that period firsthand are in the triple digits, and even then they were only children. Most readers in the target audience for this book won’t even have learned about this secondhand through grandparents, but rather third-hand through books or the internet or museums, and I feel like that’s a huge distinction for how we view “recent history” that rarely gets talked about. As a bonus, those styles were some of the last to really incorporate Greek mythology into their designs. The most obvious example of this is the Rockefeller Atlas, but there’s also the iconic Prometheus in the nearby fountain, as well as a whole bunch of others littered around the architecture of NYC that was built around the ‘20s and ‘30s. Other artists of the period like Alphonse Mucha loved to incorporate the zodiac into their work as well. These things all died down during the red scare when America wanted to show God how much we loved and feared him, but that’s a topic for another day.
My D’Aulaires does fine by me when I need a little nostalgia hit and I want to read the myths through someone else’s eyes, but for younger generations I would recommend Fry’s work over theirs. The updates to the language, structure, and attitude make for just enough of a polish that teenagers will appreciate. Besides that, even not taking that audience into account, it functions fine as a coffee table book or curio. 2 stars.