2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

Reread for book club, where we discussed the tension between humour and horror, and I discovered the story behind the mysterious Tuireann: we felt he was a collector, but his story was only broadly hinted.

There's some glorious prose here, too, that reminds me to look forward to Lennon's next novel.

It’s an eerie walk this morning. The moon is still up, a slender blade that’s larger and crisper than the frail sun. Theros is long gone. The leaves don’t so much fall as rip from the trees. All of them are red, and they skitter along the roads like bleeding stars under that knife of moon. [loc. 1366]

And here's an interview which gives some background to the novel: .

...thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. ... a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides. Ferdia Lennon: ‘I was tired of Merchant Ivory accents’ (Observer)