Glorious Exploits: A Novel

"In some ways, the further back in history you go, the easier it is to write because you have more latitude with facts, tone, speech, really almost everything. Also, the further back you go the harder it is to prove an author wrong, though it doesn’t stop some readers from trying. As a writer you have a different, and in some ways more daunting, challenge: to try to recreate lives, mindsets and experiences which are, if we’re being truthful, pretty unknowable. You can copy a picture from a Grecian urn and that’s fine, but if you try and write like, say, Homer, you just sound like somebody trying to write like Homer. Ferdia Lennon most emphatically does not do that! He has launched out in a way that to most authors would feel foolhardy but he has turned into a triumph. With no preamble, he presents us with an informal, chatty Syracuse of 412 BC. He can see the place and hear the tone so clearly in his head that the reader, whilst knowing perfectly well that both tone and story are fiction, never doubts him. That’s quite a feat. Such a good question! It’s easier to be funny in ‘factual’ history books, isn’t it, for example The Horrible Histories and 1066 and All That . I’d say historical fiction is more witty than outright funny. From Walter Scott through the Asterix series to the Blackadder scripts we find witty banter and comical situations. Ferdia Lennon offers a different kind of humour, unique – at least I’ve never read anything quite like it before. Startling, too, particularly to the modern reader to whom the whole notion of finding any humour in the dumping of your enemy prisoners in quarries and leaving them to boil in the day, to freeze at night and to starve all the time might be troubling, to say the least. What we’re really offered in Glorious Exploits is, I suppose, a tragi-comedy, with the emotional complexity that that particular brand of humour brings with it."

"This is a book set during the Peloponnesian war but its characters could be existing today, and are written by an Irish writer with an Irish lilt. But somehow it works. These are Athenian slaves chained in a pit, creating a play and making pots. And it has all the elements of a buddy movie, elements of the absurd. Now, I read this book in Syracuse, where it is set. I was there, and it was 42ºC, and I was surrounded by sweaty tourists running around behind the guides with their flags, I just felt that he’d captured the whole character of Sicily. “We ended up with seven books on the shortlist this year, all of them extraordinarily good” Now, I love history, I love Classics. And I think if you can take something like the failed invasion of Sicily in 412BC, and make a buddy comedy out of it—well, you’ve got something very unique. It’s tough to make slavery and death funny, but it does. In my six years of judging this prize, it’s the most unique book I’ve read. Or, perhaps, this and Percival Everett’s The Trees . I absolutely loved it. I thought, perhaps, I’d cheated by reading it in Sicily, but when I reread it on a cold, miserable Welsh day, I still thought it was extraordinary. Yes. We asked: Is this too serious a book to be in a comedy prize? But no, it’s not. Comedy can be anything. I laughed a lot while reading."