Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like listening to Stephen Fry narrate an audiobook while you’re crafting or doing chores. The man has a voice and speaking style just made for storytelling. I suspect that if he was a university professor, he’d be the sort who could make any topic interesting, just by being such an engaging speaker. But thankfully, in Heroes, he has an inherently interesting topic.
Heroes picks up around where Mythos ends off. While that first book was about the gods, the titans, and the earlier days of creation, Heroes gets a little more into what the humans and demigods were up to on Earth. The gods are still involved, of course. If they’re not fathering children, they’re getting mad at someone for defiling their temple or failing to revere them enough, or they’re doing a favor for their earthly half-siblings.
As with Mythos, Fry weaves a lot of elements into these stories. He tells you the myths, yes, and refers back to earlier myths and hints at stories yet to come. But he also talks about how these myths left their mark on our geography, language, and popular culture. He sprinkles modern references in, not as a way to seem “cool”, but naturally, as you might when telling a story to your friends. He brings the ancient, the historic, and the modern together and shows how the tales of the heroes aren’t just entertaining, they shaped our world. In fact, if you want to know more about that, you should just go read my review of Mythos. Let’s move on to what is unique about Heroes.
You can probably surmise from the title what this book is about: the heroes of Greek mythology, those demigods and other generally supernaturally awesome people (mostly dudes…) who went around doing labors and ridding the ancient world of monsters. As I listened to these stories, I identified a few themes that the storytellers of the day seemed to like to go back to:
- Someone needs some advice, so they consult an oracle (often the one at Delphi). They don’t like what the oracle tells them, so they decide they will take actions to thwart fate. They do not, in fact, thwart fate.
- A beautiful woman is chained to a rock to be fed to a terrible monster, and a hero just happens by! He slays the monster and they fall immediately in love. They may or may not live happily ever after.
- A hero visits a king. The king welcomes him. The king later realizes he wants to kill the hero, but he can’t because that would violate xenia (hospitality/the guest right) and Zeus hates that. Better send the hero to fight that boar/bull/chimera that’s been terrorizing the countryside; surely that will take care of him. Wait, what do you mean he killed it?
Honestly, I don’t think I’d like most of these heroes if I met them. They seemed pretty obnoxious, prone to mood swings, and also prone to practically having a girl in every port. It’s an interesting window into what the ancient Greeks thought was appropriately heroic and manly behavior — and rather than being a monolith, of course, you can see what different city-states prioritized by what they praised about their particular hero.
Listening to these stories, I didn’t find them men to be admired, but Fry still makes their stories enjoyable, just as he made the foibles of the gods entertaining. I’m looking forward to finding time to listen to Troy later this year!
CWs and TWs: Brief but repeated mentions of sexual assault. Lots of violence, and I found this one a little gorier than Mythos. There’s discussions of child death via the practice of “exposure”, as well as Medea’s murder of her younger brother and her own sons. Plenty of violence against animals, most of them magical/divine. And Oedipus is in here, so there’s some incest.
Format and Source: I borrowed this audiobook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): When You Need a Hero. I wouldn’t want any of these heroes, except Atalanta, to rescue me from a rock before a monster ate me (because they’d expect me to marry them, of course), but I’d definitely be glad for any of them to be around if a divine boar was messing up my neighborhood.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading Book Bingo: Retelling. Retellings usually take one of three forms: they focus in on one more minor character; they gender-swap or otherwise make changes to a character but mostly leave the story intact; or they set the story in a different time and/or place (maybe an entirely fictional setting). Fry leaves the stories intact and just brings his own unique voice to them. I love that our world has room for all these different ways to tell these classic stories.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 14 out of 25 prompts complete. 1 bingo.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 12 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 4 out of 23 prompts, 0 bingos.