Heroes

When I found out Stephen Fry wrote a couple of books on Greek mythology, I was surprised. Not by the fact that he wrote them, but by how quickly I put one on hold at the library. Heroes is technically the second book (Mythos, covering more godly matters, being the first) but even a cursory understanding of Greek mythology will give you the background necessary to jump into this one.

A lot of the time it's very difficult to get a clear picture of a Greek hero's life outside of short summaries because the Greeks often wrote about small vignettes of their life at a time - I've read poems and plays about Heracles' individual labours, people he interacted with, the murder of his family, but nothing that really takes you from his birth to his rise to Olympus. Fry does a fantastic job of compiling all these different stories into a cohesive timeline of each hero's life, even noting when there are conflicts between different sources, and he does so with great wit and a solid knack for storytelling.

The book covers many of the biggest heroic figures pre-Troy. Perseus, Jason, Heracles, and Theseus take up the bulk of the book, but he also tells the tales of Bellerophon, Atalanta, and Oedipus. Along the way we hear about Daedalus, Icarus, the Minotaur, Medea, Nestor, and many more, their stories presented almost as an aside to the others but still entertaining. It's clear that he spent far too much time researching this book as he talks about the confused timing of Heracles' and Theseus' lives and the varied births and deaths of many figures. 

I didn't notice any issues with the stories that particularly bothered me, although there were a few weird editorial issues throughout. Nothing super major, just awkward since so much of the book clearly had a lot of love and effort put into it. The only one that really bugged me was referring to Polydeuces as Pollux exactly once in the book, out of nowhere, for no clear reason, but even that is fairly minor on the whole.

This book is very reminiscent of Neil Gaimain's Norse Mythology - it compiles a bunch of different sources together into a series of coherent stories written in clear modern prose. Fry had a much harder job ahead of him, what with the many dozens of possible sources, and he did just about as well with it. For a modern, approachable introduction to Greek heroes this is easily the best I've ever seen.

Modern retelling of 8ish heroes and their journeys. Heroes is more focused than Mythos was, and it benefits both books respectively. Some stories might not be very thorough, but this is a good and enjoyable intro to the characters.

The etymology was again fascinating. There were far more names and minor characters to keep track of in this book. Fry even pauses to tell you not to worry too much about keeping them all straight. I didn't.

There were a few times that hero characters overlapped, and those were the most enjoyable stories.

Make no mistake, this is Greek mythology, so the heroes in Heroes are assholes. They're just assholes who have slain monster assholes, or who have been wronged by even bigger assholes. But everyone in this book, with very few exceptions, is an asshole. The action and popular battles are told very briefly, leaving most of the book to documenting drama between various assholes.