The Odyssey

"The Odyssey by Homer, as told by Gillian Cross, illustrated by Neil Packer Yes, very much so. Gillian Cross was one of my favourite storytellers growing up – I loved her Demon Headmaster series – and this is a perfect introduction to one of the most famous and important of all works of literature. The Odyssey is Homer’s epic telling of the troubled homeward journey of Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca, in the aftermath of the Trojan War . It’s originally a poem but Cross’s version renders it into a very simple and natural prose style and it’s in an accessible large-font layout which should appeal to children of different reading abilities. The illustrations by Neil Packer are also wonderfully and sinisterly evocative. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend that you read a sequel before its predecessor and in this case that would be Homer’s other great epic, the Iliad, which focuses more on certain events in the Trojan War itself. There’s a retelling of that by Cross and Packer as well for anyone who wants to start there. But if you ask me, the Odyssey ’s got everything you want in a story – heroes, gods, monsters, flesh-eating giants, deadly whirlpools, revenge, betrayal, justice, archery contests, you name it. It’s a great one to read with and to your children – in fact I lent my copy recently to a Year 6 pupil [age 10-11] that I teach and her mother emailed me later to say that they had read it together in stages every night and her daughter was enthralled by it. Yes, the illustrations are wonderful – lots of dramatic colour and striking, ghostly silhouettes. Some of the monsters, like the Cyclops, are rendered in fantastically grotesque detail. In the wisdom of my later years, I realize how much more appropriate they are than the d’Aulaires’ lithographs, which though exquisite, tended to rose-tint everything and also portrayed a lot of the gods as if they were golden-haired Scandinavian surf dudes. With Packer, there’s much more diversity and edgy wit. Absolutely, the story of what’s happening to Penelope back home in Ithaca while her husband is away fighting in Troy and then sailing back home, is just as important – if not more so – than what’s happening on the high seas. Odysseus is away from home for twenty years in total – ten years fighting the war and ten years trying to get back – and all that time, Penelope has to raise her son Telemachus, who’s just a baby when his father leaves home. She also has to use her own cunning to put off an increasingly persistent and bullying bunch of suitors who want to persuade her that Odysseus is dead and that she should marry one of them. People often think of the Odyssey as just a tale about Odysseus’s encounters with monsters like the Cyclops and the Sirens, but only a small fraction of the poem actually covers those bits. What’s going on back home with Odysseus’s family takes up much more space."