A prose retelling of the Iliad from Odysseus's point of view. The great strength of Buday's novel isn't in any formal innovation or revisionism. Rather, it's the crispness, humour and beauty of the prose that make this book worth seeking out.
May 5th, 7PM: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: St. Luke’s Parish Hall, Burlington, Ontario (with Sandra Sabatini and Kim Echlin)
May 9th-10th: Stephen Henighan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Pacific Festival of the Book, #110-2750 Quadra St, Victoria BC
May 11th, 7: 30 PM: Stephen Hengihan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Oakridge Library, 1–650 West 41st Street, Vancouver, B.C
May 12th, 7:30 pm: Stephen Henighan, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, Central Library, 350 West Georgia Street, Victoria, B.C.
May 13th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: Landon Branch Library, 167 Wortley Rd, London, Ontario.
May 14th, 7-9 pm, Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Bistro Bar at the Sylvia hotel, 1154 Gilford St, Vancouver, BC.
May 21st, 12 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening: Callan Books, 15 York St., Stratford, Ontario (SIGNING)
May 23rd, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, The Manx Pub Plann 99 Reading Series, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, Ontario
May 26th, Hans Eichner, Kahn & Engelmann (read by Kari Grimstad), Harbourfront Reading Series, Toronto.
June 1st, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, McNally-Robinson, Toronto (with Vicki Delaney)
June 6th, TBA, Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, The Manx Pub Plann 99 Reading Series, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, Ontario
June 8th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening & Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Wordsworth Books, 100 King st., South Waterloo, Ontario
June 9th, 7:30 pm: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening & Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Hans Eichner, Kahn & Engelmann (read by Kari Grimstad), The Bookshelf, 41 Quebec St, Guelph, Ontario
June 11th, 7 pm: Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, TBA, Windsor, Ontario
July 5th, TBA, Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, Bayfield.June 15th, TBA: Cynthia Flood, The English Stories, Langara College, Nanaimo, BC
July 24-26, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, The Leacock Festival, Orillia, Ontario
September 20th, All Day: Terry Griggs (Thought You Were Dead/Quickening), Grant Buday (Dragonflies), Hans Eichner (Kahn & Engelmann, read by Kari Grimstad) and Leon Rooke (Hitting the Charts), at The Eden Mills Writers Festival.
September 20th-27th, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/Quickening, at Winnipeg’s Thin Air Writers’ Festival
October 30-Nov.2nd, TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead, Quickening, at Bookfest Windsor
November TBA: Terry Griggs, Thought You Were Dead/ Quickening, Trent University, Peterborough
By Grant Buday. Biblioasis, 180 pp, $19.95, softcover
Considering the Trojan Horse is such a vibrant and lasting image from Greek history and mythology, it’s a little jarring to realize that almost none of the original references have survived. Chronologically, it falls between the cracks of Homer’sIliad and Odyssey, and all but a few lines of its source poem have been lost. How tempting, then, to try and reconnect these momentous dots: how the ever-crafty Odysseus dreams the contraption up; how he convinces his fellow soldiers to hole up inside, silent, for days on end; and what makes the enemy Trojans bring it inside their city’s walls, rather than do the safe thing and burn it to the ground.
While certainly not the first attempt at such a re-imagining, Dragonflies, the new novel from Mayne Island’s Grant Buday, does an admirable job of it, synthesizing various secondhand accounts (from Virgil, Sophocles, and Homer, to name a few) into one sharp, crisp hybrid.
The book opens in Year 10 of the Trojan War—the last year, as it turns out, though nobody on either side sees an end coming anytime soon. Odysseus’s wit has mostly given way to anger, as his generals Agamemnon and Menelaus oafishly pursue a fight that cannot be won, and a prize (Menelaus’s abducted wife, Helen) that may not even want to be claimed. To console himself, Odysseus indulges in daydreams about his own family back home in Ithaka, which quickly snowball into fantasies of treason: “What reward can compensate for the ten years I’ve lost? Chopping ten years from his [Agamemnon’s] life? Putting a spear up his ass? A futile line of thought, one I indulge too much.”
Climbing inside Odysseus’s head is neat enough—Homer never ventured close to interior monologue—but Buday blocks out the overwhelming clatter and bombast of the war itself long enough to spend time with many of his brothers in arms. Did you know, for example, that the mighty Ajax’s first love is studying bees? That one small detail gives his life more depth, and somehow makes his suicide a little more tragic.
Another rave of a review for Grant Buday's Dragonflies, this one from The Vancouver Sun. As a broad description, "a novel about the Trojan War" suggests two distinct possibilities. It could be a page-turning cast-of-thousands romantic epic, like Colleen McCullough's 500-page The Song of Troy. Equally possible is an economical and sly revisiting, one similar in spirit to that undertaken by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad.
At 165 pages, Grant Buday's Dragonflies, an unfailingly attractive character study of one Odysseus of Ithaca, forgoes pages of historical detail, fierce battle scenes and intricate plotting in favour of a spare but pithy meditation on one of literature's archetypal heroes.
As though in answer to Atwood's hard-done-by Penelope, this sympathetic portrait figuratively strips off the hero's imposing armour and reveals the complex workings of the flesh-and-blood man beneath.
Buday does present readers with an invigorating account of the creation of the fabled wooden horse that ended the infamous war, but it's his characterization of Odysseus and his ethical demons that's so completely gripping.
Having written novels about a renowned explorer's tangled relationship with a Mongol emperor (The Venetian), a miserable shift worker in a commercial bakery (White Lung), a floundering pot farmer (Rootbound) and a perplexed boy beginning elementary school (A Sack of Teeth), Mayne Islander Buday has clearly spent time pondering males caught in a bind.
And his Odysseus is exceptionally bound. Coerced into service a decade before to protect his family and subsisting on the losing side of a ridiculous war ever since, he is embittered, lonely, fearful, resentful and exhausted.
What's worse, his miserable circumstance is compounded by life-threatening politicking. Already tense and volatile, Odysseus's allegiance to Agamemnon is further complicated by the king's murderous and scheming generals and by a soothsayer who uses poisonous words to undermine his credibility. Besieged by mosquitoes, snakes and jackals, Odysseus can't help but admire the dragonflies at the encampment. "Admirable hunters," their single-mindedness and success inspire envy.
With little in the present day except misery, bad meals (seaweed and meat scraps) and ceaseless political intrigue, Odysseus is sombre and thoughtful, anxious that he's repeating his father Laertes's wandering ways and failing as both father and husband. His single hope for a comfortable retirement with his family is tethered to the war's completion, and as the novel opens there's no armistice in sight.
The hero's mind also drifts, with bittersweet emotions, to Helen, whose otherworldly beauty is the root cause of the entire conflict.
Throughout Dragonflies, Buday endows Odysseus with a captivating eloquence. Whether he's making observations ("Palamedes was shark-smiling. He enjoyed seeing me squirm. He had a narrow skull, a crow's nose, eyes close-set and small, a short damp black beard that made me think of pubic hair") or being introspective ("And yet such thoughts make me nostalgic, and with nostalgia comes regret, an enervating indulgence to which I'm growing all too prone, another reason I admire cats, they seem impervious to self-doubt"), the self-described "bow-legged runt" of a storyteller is wonderful company.
Because he's so eloquent and lyrical (not to mention gifted with a sharp tongue), pensive Odysseus's personal account renders literary themes -- love, war, fate, retribution -- immediate, heartfelt and real.
Horse of a Different ColourAt the start of Dragonflies, Grant Buday's novel about Odysseus and his invention of the Trojan Horse, it has been 10 years since the Greeks began their siege of Troy. No end is in sight. Nature itself seems ill-disposed to the besiegers. "It's spring, the time of dragonflies," Odysseus reflects. "They're admirable hunters, patrolling the meadows, hovering, darting, killing. It's a dangerous season for men as well, for the jackals and wolves are on the move, and when we venture inland we wrap our ankles in leather against snakes. The days grow hot, the mosquito breeds and the season of fever is near."
This crisp, summary style is characteristic of the novel's first-person narrative, in which not a detail or metaphor is superfluous, the narrative pace never lags and the prevailing tone is gloomy. Buday even manages to create a certain suspense, although we all know the outcome of this story -- in revisiting the figure of Odysseus, Buday is tapping into the wellsprings of Western literature, vivifying a motif that Pound and Joyce, among others, exploited in the 20th century. Three years ago, in her novel The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood adopted the point of view of Odysseus's wife -- confirming once again that the meaning of this story is inexhaustible.
Atwood, it is needless to say, took a distinctly unheroic approach to her material, and so does Buday -- his Odysseus is crafty and a liar, which is not far removed from Homer's conception of the character. Neither Atwood nor Buday, in fact, can be accused of gratuitous debunking. Even the ancient Greeks probably thought there was something ridiculous about the idea of 10 years of brutal warfare because a Trojan stole somebody's wife, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is only the best known of satirical treatments of such Homeric blowhards as Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax. Buday also owes something to the cynical tone of another historical novelist, Gore Vidal. Like Vidal, Buday avoids subtle or deeply rounded characterization in favour of stark, dramatic portraits of male combatants in a highly political world.
Two main themes inform Buday's tale. The first is the theme of "reputation," an unceasing imperative in the world of these Greek warriors. For all his wiliness, Odysseus ends up sacrificing his wife and son and 10 years of his life to the bubble reputation, realizing too late that even a fool like Menelaus, Helen's injured husband, can defy reputation if he has sufficient determination.
The second theme is the nature of the "gods." Odysseus is accused by his enemies of disbelieving in their very existence. This is not quite true. When Penelope gives birth to their son, Telemachus, Odysseus smears his house with pitch against evil spirits. In general, however, it is true that Odysseus prefers practical schemes to propitiating the favour of the gods or divining omens.
It's not as if Odysseus invents the scientific method in this novel, but he does display an observant, relatively detached attitude toward his environment -- at one point he finds himself "reading the exposed strata of rock and soil in all its variety" -- that heralds the onset of what we think of as Western man.
Buday manages this development convincingly, without setting up some facile conflict in the narrative between modern-minded Odysseus and a bunch of superstitious morons. "Let's face it," he muses at one point. "All men are fools for Signs." We all want the cosmos to communicate with us in some fashion, mostly through omens or "Signs." The Trojans let that desire get the better of them by viewing the Trojan Horse as a "Sign," instead of using their heads. But Odysseus is not sneering or patronizing in this observation. He knows we're all caught between a rock and a hard place. Reflecting on his misfortunes, Odysseus asks himself, "Is this the work of cruel gods, blind fate or simply chaos?"
Buday, who lives in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia and has authored half a dozen novels and short-story collections, lays on this theme a bit thick, but then 10 years of futile siege warfare would make anybody turn philosophical. The only consolations in Odysseus's world are narcotics ("poppy water"), wine, memories of his wife and child and their pastoral life back home in Ithaka, a bit of song and storytelling. The last is particularly important. Odysseus "rates no prize higher than a good story."
Stories make irony bearable. But Buday's deftly constructed and convincing tale has a final irony, fat and juicy, in store for its hero. It crops up in the last sentence of the novel, after Troy has been sacked and the war is over. "Soon, very soon, in a month at most, I will be at home," Odysseus thinks, ignorant that the Odyssey is coming down the pike, and more years of wandering. Clever Odysseus's wrestling match with cruel gods, blind fate and chaos is just beginning.
-- reviewed by Philip Marchand
The fall of Troy is a story that will be encountered by even moderately literate people any number of times over a healthy lifetime. You know the set-up (or I hope you do): Helen is snatched up by Paris, and her beautiful visage sends a thousand ships to the city of Troy. A war is fought for years, until Odysseus hatches a plan involving a wooden horse secretly stuffed with Greek soldiers. That’s the gist of it (with a lot in between), covering Homer’s Iliad and some time after, before the great warriors set off on the long voyage home to Ithaca.
Grant Buday’s kind of modern adaptation, Dragonflies, tells the story of the Trojan Horse, its inspiration and execution, through the eyes of Odysseus, but it’s really through eyes you may only think you recognize. Whereas Homer’s poems are told through action more than characterization – if the characters have depth (that is, flaws) it is secondary to the flow of history and the grand heroics of Greek tragedy – Buday’s adaptation includes ruminations on doubt, both personal and cosmological. Here, nothing is guaranteed, even for the mightiest warrior. The Gods are not characters, but wisps of wind and symbols of fate, which both favours and destroys us.
Odysseus, Ajax, and others are described more as soldiers than warriors. They are not the literal descendants of gods who are birthed to fight, but men conscripted by Agamemnon and battered by years of war. They put up with injuries and with homesickness. They fart and spit and bleed. When Dragonflies begins, the camp along the beach is filled with men who have grown old in battle and whores with children who do not know anything else. Buday’s fall of Troy closely resembles modern sieges, instead of seeming ancient or mythic – the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, for example.
In this style, Buday succeeds where many have failed in adaptations of ancient stories. He imagines the war as it would have been documented by a writer of the late 20th century. He does not implant our customs but twists the narrative into something accessible. As a character, Odysseus is admirable and clever but not infallible. His Trojan Horse plan is examined from realistic angles. It is, as Buday and his characters admit, a rather far-fetched plan, which succeeds in part thanks to the Trojans' carelessness rather than merely being a triumphant, fiendish plot.
At a lean 164 pages, Dragonflies does not waste words. It's a tale well told – an updating of myth that avoids grandeur and favours subtlety. Buday is a gifted writer, and what comes across in his novel is a love for storytelling, a keen sense of history, and an ability to make even the most tired of tales worth hearing again.
Re-imagining history is popular with novelists at the moment, as evidenced by Fred Stenson’s recent book The Great Karoo, among others. But few make the past come alive as vividly as Vancouver author Grant Buday does in Dragonflies, a very funny book, superbly imagined and beautifully told.
In the sad, desperate last days of the Trojan War, Troy is no closer to falling than it was 10 years before, and the Greeks, reduced to eating limpets, are down to their last sacrificial bulls. Agamemnon gives the clever Odysseus, the “battered old tomcat” who narrates the tale, has a servant to pluck the hairs from his nose, remembers the past, and doubts the present, the task of coming up with one last gambit to win the war.
Dragonflies features many of the Trojan War’s major figures, including Menelaus, Palamedes, and Ajax, but they are not the mythic heroes we have become accustomed to. They are flawed humans lured into fighting by desire, fear, or old oaths. Agamemnon is a clod, thick-necked and hairy, and Calchas the soothsayer, whom Odysseus nicknames “Couch Ass,” is a fraudulent, “ugly old man whose face looks like it’s been carved from an onion.”
Odysseus is a very likeable narrator, but his skill with words can be hurtful and his skepticism gets him into trouble. His suggestion that all of Helen’s suitors swear allegiance to whomever eventually wins her hand avoids conflict in the short term, but only augments the size of Menelaus’s army later on.
A detailed knowledge of Greek myth is not essential to appreciate Buday’s novel, although spotting the occasional Homeric turn of phrase is fun. And the wonderful, tragic irony of Odysseus’s glee at the prospect of being home in a month depends on knowing that his journey is really just beginning. – John Wilson, whose latest book is Germania (Key Porter Books).
