“Repetitions and lack of grammatical complexity both help to make Homer a swift, lively, vivid and easy read” – that is from Peter Jones’ introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Odyssey and I completely agree with that statement. I am often given the impression that The Odyssey is some long and arcane ancient text occupying a level well beyond the difficult language of Shakespeare, and just a little beyond Joyce’s Ulysses and Tolstoy’s War and Peace in terms of insurmountability: “You read the Odyssey?!” (with awed gasping). But really, it’s no more complex than, say, Philip Pullman’s excellent His Dark Materials trilogy; books primarily written for young teenagers.

What we have in The Odyssey is an uncomplicated narrative told in plain modern English. Although it is classed as an epic poem, it really bares no resemblance to what we think of as poetry today: the only reason it is poetry is that, in its original ancient Greek it was spoken and written in hexameter (that’s six metrical feet per line, or six pairs of two syllables), but this has been lost in the translation so that it now appears to be, essentially, a novel with numbered lines.

Don’t get me wrong though: that the language is uncomplicated and the narrative is easy to follow does not have any bearing on how epic the story is. It covers, amazingly, around sixty years of its heroes life, although not in strictly chronological order. It’s hard to explain exactly how Homer does this (Peter Jones does so admirably in his introduction to the text), but he manages it beautifully without the potential confusion of, for example, Pulp Fiction’s time-swapping antics. The main way Homer achieves his narration of events from many different times is through the use of stories within stories. While these could have the potential to either distract from the narrative flow or confuse the reader into wondering what time-frame the story is currently in, Homer avoids this by flowing naturally into the stories and then bringing the narrative out of them just as easily, usually by having a character mention something, which sparks the story, and then returning to what was originally mentioned at the end of the story (which is apparently known as ‘ring-composition’).

So what is The Odyssey about? The general focus of the story is Odysseus return home to Ithaca after a twenty year absence and fighting in the Trojan war. Before I go any further, let me just explain a couple of things, so we don’t get lost: Odysseus is a mythical Greek hero. His biggest claim to fame was that he was the one who came up with the Trojan horse trick in the Trojan war. The Trojan war was a ten year war between one lot of Greeks (the Achaeans) and another lot (the Trojans) after one of the Trojans kidnapped Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta. It is perhaps the single most important event in Greek mythology and is covered in, among other things, Homer’s Iliad (incidentally, the first great work of Western literature) and the film Troy.

So, Odysseus had left his home in Ithaca (an area of Greece where he rules as King) to go fight in the ten-year-long Trojan war, leaving behind his wife, Penelope, and his newborn son Telemachus. He becomes a war-hero and sets sail triumphantly for him. However, the winds are not in his favour for the return journey and he gets blown all over the Mediterranean, landing on various islands, getting into misadventures, and unintentionally pissing off certain Gods. Eventually this leads to him being trapped on an island for a further eight years by a demi-Goddess named Calypso.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, is growing up and is finding his house overrun by suitors trying to gain his mother’s hand in marriage. She doesn’t want to marry any of them because she still believes Odysseus will return home, so while they wait for her to change her mind, the suitors sit around in Odysseus’ palace eating all his food and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The unfairness of all this stirs the Goddess Athene to take pity on Odysseus and Telemachus and so she decides to help in return home, which is more-or-less where the Odyssey starts.

Sound simple enough? The only problem you could conceivably have with reading the text is keeping track of all the Greek names that are mentioned. For anyone who has ever read a fantasy novel, or even just seen Lord of the Rings this really shouldn’t be a problem. And, speaking of fantasy, though you might expect some problem with suspension of disbelief on account of all the intervening Gods and the Cyclopes and such, there really isn’t: each is described so nonchalantly and convincingly that you really don’t find yourself questioning, for example, Athene disguising herself as a family friend to talk to Telemachus and tell him to find Odysseus. And there is restraint too, which helps the suspension of disbelief: everything in the Odyssey is either human, or part-god, or God; there’s none of the swashbuckling skeletons and animate iron statues of Jason and the Argonauts.

If you’re still not convinced of the ease with which this great book can be read, here’s an excerpt from the opening page:

“All the survivors of the war had reached their homes by now and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them. Odysseus alone was now prevented from returning to the home and wife he yearned for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who longed for him to marry her, and kept him in her vaulted cave. Not even when the rolling seasons brought in the year which the gods had chosen for his homecoming to Ithaca was he clear of his troubles and safe among his friends. Yet all the gods pitied him, except Posiedon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country.”

See? Nothing complicated, no big words, just simple, elegant writing. The Odyssey is a fantastic book for anyone to read: it’s the book equivalent of a more epic 300.