Odysseus as We've Never Seen Him Before

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.

More Praise for Buday...

... this time from the Vancouver Sun's Weekend review section. Mentions an upcoming review, which I'll bring to Thirsty as soon as it runs.

For now, from The Vancouver Sun:

To Be A Man. By all accounts, Grant Buday's slender new historical novel, Dragonflies, is a stunning work. Buday reconstructs the last days of the Trojan War, focusing on Odysseus. Our review, coming soon, sees it as a companion piece to Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and says much of its excellence lies in its "subtle and clever interrogation of masculinity." Buday wrote of males caught in a bind in earlier books such as White Lung and Rootbound.

Praise for Buday's Dragonflies

Horse of a Different Colour

A review by Philip Marchand in The National Post

At 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

Buday reading tomorrow night in Victoria (Thursday night in Vancouver)

Grant Buday will be launching his novel Dragonflies tomorrow evening at the Cornerstone Cafe, 1301 Gladstone Ave. Victoria, at 7 pm. Also on the bill, A. S. Penne, author of Reckoning, Samantha Warwick, author of Sage Island, and Craig Boyko, the author of Blackouts. It'll be a night of fine fiction.

Grant will be launching December 4th in Vancouver at Cafe Montmartre on Main Street as well. 6:30 to 8:30, with Michele Adams, author of Bright Objects of Desire, and long-time Grant Buday fan, stepping in to be the official press representative and emcee. For which I heartily thank her.

Grant's novel is a stellar one, perhaps the best novel we've published here at Biblioasis. Stephen Henighan wrote to me about it in a note this weekend, and I hope that he won't mind me quoting from him here: "I just finished Buday's Dragonflies. I really enjoyed it. As you know, I often feel too many historical novels are published in this country, but this one is original enough and human enough to count as art. I think it's one of the best books you've published."

Stephen also told me that the Literary Review of Canada has it included in their best of the year list. I haven't been able to confirm that, but t'is a deserving book, and really does deserve a wide audience. So for any in Victoria or Vancouver when he's reading, please head on down and lend him an ear. For the rest of you, it should be at the closest bookstore worth its salt right now.

Starred Q&Q review of Grant Buday's Dragonflies

In the November issue of Quill & Quire, Grant Buday's Dragonflies, a novel about the last days of the Trojan War as told from Odysseus's perspective, received a starred review. This is the second starred review from Q&Q for Biblioasis in as many months. The key things to get from this review: very funny, superbly imagined, beautifully told. Also: a damn good yarn. Fab cover. Need we say more?


The review:

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).