The Odyssey – The Long Road Home

52 Books in a Year – Week 3

Let me tell you what I thought the Odyssey was about before I read it. I thought it was about a man trying to get home. A hero, a journey, some monsters, a faithful wife waiting, a happy ending. I thought it was an adventure story wearing the clothes of mythology. I thought I more or less knew what I was getting.

I was wrong. Not about the plot. The plot is exactly that. I was wrong about what the plot means.

The Odyssey is not about getting home. It is about what getting home costs. And more than that, more quietly and more devastatingly than that, it is about what home becomes once you have been away long enough that both you and it have changed beyond easy recognition. That idea, so simple to state and so difficult to fully absorb, is what stayed with me long after I closed the book. You spend ten years at war and another ten trying to get back, and by the time you walk through the door you are not the person who left. And neither is anyone else.

That is not an adventure story. That is one of the most human things literature has ever put into words.

Where It Sits on This List

I read the Iliad first. Then this. That ordering is important and I want to spend a moment on it because the contrast between the two books is part of what makes each of them work.

The Iliad is about collective suffering, honour and the machinery of war. Also about what it does to everyone caught inside it. Individual heroes emerge, Achilles, Hector, Patroclus, but the war itself is always the largest presence in the room.

Then there is The Odyssey, which is intimate. One man. One journey. One home. And ten years of him trying to reach it, and a wave full of obstacles trying to kill, distract or seduce him into failure. After the collective tragedy of the Iliad, the focus narrows to something you can hold in your hands. And that narrowing is an enormous relief that somehow makes everything hit harder.

Odysseus

I need to talk about Odysseus properly because he is one of the great creations in all of literature and I do not think he always gets his due in the way that Achilles does.

Achilles is easier to understand. He is pure. Pure rage, pure grief, pure pride, pure love for Patroclus. His emotions are enormous and singular and they drive everything he does. You always know exactly where you are with Achilles because he is always feeling one thing with his entire being.

Odysseus is different. He is cunning, brave and loyal. He was also surprisingly unfaithful. But his ability to be patient and impulsive, sometimes within the same scene made him intriguing to me. He is a man who can spend years on Calypso's island in what any external observer would describe as paradise, sleeping with a goddess, living in comfort, and still sit on the shore every evening weeping for home. He contains contradictions that do not resolve. He is, in that specific sense, completely real. Have you ever been in paradise and still missed home, I know I have!

What I find most interesting about him is that he is not the greatest warrior in the room. That was always Achilles. Odysseus is the smartest person in the room, every room, and he knows it, and he uses it, and occasionally it gets him into trouble because being the smartest person in the room can make you careless about other people's feelings. The Cyclops episode is the perfect example. He blinds Polyphemus, escapes, and then cannot resist shouting his real name back across the water as he sails away. Pure ego. Completely unnecessary. It is the act that ensures Poseidon will spend the next several years trying to kill him.

He knows better. He does it anyway. That is Odysseus in one moment. Brilliant and human and his own worst enemy.

The Monsters

Let us talk about the monsters because they are extraordinary and because I think they are doing more work than they might first appear to be doing.

The Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Circe who turns men into pigs, the Lotus Eaters who offer a forgetting so pleasant it becomes its own kind of death. Reading them in sequence you start to notice something. Every monster or obstacle on Odysseus's journey is, in some way, a version of the same temptation. Stop. Stay. Forget where you were going. The Lotus Eaters offer literal forgetting. Circe offers transformation into something that no longer needs to go home. Calypso offers immortality, actual immortality, eternal life in paradise, in exchange for giving up the idea of Ithaca entirely.

And Odysseus, to his immense credit and at enormous personal cost, keeps saying no. Not always immediately. Not always without considerable human weakness along the way. But eventually, always, no. He wants to go home more than he wants any of the things being offered to him. That is his defining characteristic and it is a more interesting one than brute strength or battlefield glory.

There is also the Sirens, which I want to single out because it is my favourite episode in the book. Odysseus knows the Sirens will lure him to his death if he hears them unprotected. So he has his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, with instructions not to release him no matter what he does or says. And then he listens. He is the only human being in the story who hears the Sirens and survives. He hears them because he has built a system around his own weakness rather than pretending the weakness does not exist.

As a filmmaker and a writer I find that image endlessly useful. The man tied to the mast, experiencing the thing that would destroy him, surviving it precisely because he was honest enough about his own limits to plan around them. That is not just mythology. That is a philosophy of how to live with yourself.

Penelope

Penelope is one of the great characters in ancient literature and I want to say that plainly because she does not always get the recognition she deserves, which is frankly a pattern with the women in these epics and one I have noticed consistently throughout this challenge.

She has been waiting twenty years. Twenty years with no confirmation that her husband is alive, surrounded by suitors who are eating her out of house and home and pressuring her to choose one of them and move on. She has a son who was a baby when Odysseus left and is now a grown man trying to figure out who he is without a father. She is managing an entire household and a political situation of genuine complexity entirely alone.

And she is not passive. That is the crucial thing. The shroud she weaves for Laertes by day and unravels by night, buying herself time, is one of the great acts of quiet defiance in all of literature. She is outnumbered and outpowered and she is winning anyway, through patience and intelligence and an absolute refusal to give up on something that by any reasonable external measure she should have given up on years ago.

When Odysseus finally returns in disguise, she tests him. She has this stranger, who she does not know is her husband, describe the bed they shared. The bed that Odysseus built himself, around a living olive tree, so that it cannot be moved. Only Odysseus would know this. It is the most intimate possible proof of identity. After twenty years of waiting she does not simply throw herself into his arms. She makes him prove it.

That is not distrust. That is a woman who has survived twenty years by being careful and she is not stopping now just because she wants it to be him. The recognition scene between them is one of the most emotionally precise moments in the book and it belongs entirely to her intelligence.

Going Home

Here is the thing about the ending that I keep returning to. Odysseus gets home. He kills the suitors in a scene of considerable and deliberate violence. He reunites with Penelope. He goes to see his elderly father Laertes, who has been grieving him for twenty years, living rough in an orchard. He reclaims his kingdom.

And yet.

There is a quality to the ending of the Odyssey that is not quite triumphant in the way you might expect. Odysseus is home, but he is also, inescapably, changed. Like a post-university backpacker returning from a 6 week trip to Thai Land. “You haven’t seen what these eyes have seen!” The man who left for Troy was a king at the height of his powers with a young wife and a newborn son. The man who returns is someone who has spent twenty years being tested in ways that leave marks. He has seen the underworld. He has buried companions. He has spent years on an island weeping for a home that started to feel like a memory. You can get back to the place. You cannot entirely get back to who you were when you left it.

That is what the Odyssey is actually about and it is why it is still being read after three thousand years. Not the monsters. Not the gods interfering in human affairs. Not even the cunning of Odysseus, magnificent as that is. It is about the particular human experience of going away and coming back and finding that both you and the thing you came back to have moved in ways that do not perfectly align anymore. Home is still home. But it fits differently now.

I have never been away at war for twenty years. I suspect most of you reading this have not either. And yet there is something in that experience, that specific feeling of return and misalignment and love that persists anyway, that feels completely recognisable. That is what Homer understood and why this book belongs in a different category to almost everything that came after it.

What It Does That Nothing Else Does

I have now read the Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey in sequence on this challenge. And what strikes me most about the Odyssey is how modern it feels in comparison. Not modern in a superficial sense. Modern in its psychological understanding of a single human being. Gilgamesh is about an archetype confronting mortality. The Iliad is about collective human experience inside an institution of violence. The Odyssey is about one specific, complicated, contradictory man and his interior life across twenty years of trying to get back to the people he loves.

That is the novel. Not as a form that had been invented yet, but as an impulse. The sustained, intimate, psychologically curious examination of what it feels like to be one particular person navigating a world that keeps trying to stop them. Homer did it three thousand years ago and most of what has come since is, in one way or another, in conversation with it.

Legacy

The Odyssey's fingerprints are on everything. James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses, one of the most celebrated novels in the English language, as a direct structural parallel to the Odyssey set across a single day in Dublin. The Coen Brothers made O Brother Where Art Thou, one of my favourite films, as an Odyssey retelling set in 1930s Mississippi. Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to give Penelope her own voice. Every story about a long journey home, every story about a clever protagonist who survives by wit rather than strength, every story about what it costs to keep going when stopping would be so much easier, carries something of this book in its bones.

That is not influence in the academic sense. That is a story that understood something so true about human experience that it has never stopped being useful.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

Of course it is. The Odyssey is five stars the way oxygen is five stars. You could try to argue against it but you would need to use it to make your argument.

It is five stars for Odysseus on the shore, weeping for home, shall I say more than that? We all strive for paradise and forget to reflect on what we sit on, on a day to day basis.

Next Up: The Aeneid