Kindle. Heavily-marketed historical fiction, apparently expanding on a brief account by Plutarch of how the defeated Athenians survived a bit longer in the quarries of Syracuse, Sicily by reciting Euripides. The first-person narrator speaks in a contemporary Irish argot, laced with much profanity, often overcooked. (Some words and phrasing recur too often, as in Preston's The Borrowed Hills, which is how people speak but does not make for great prose.) The story itself is structured like an ancient Greek tragedy, focussing on an epic bromance. Along the way we get summaries of Euripides's Medea and The Trojan Women; this book is far more modest than All Our Tragic. There's often a whiff of The Remains of the Day, clarified at the end, though the narrator's reliability is never in question. The final movement is hurried while some earlier parts are torporific.
Less successful are the romance subplot involving an erudite slave girl and the mechanism by which two penniless unemployed potters can afford to stage their production. The narrator himself is a pile of cliches and rarely surprises. I think Lennon missed a trick by not inventing or completing a missing Euripidean play, perhaps about future history. That move worked well for Álvaro Enrigue but he could deploy psychedelics and not just oceans of wine.
Fintan O'Toole reviewed it in one of his better essays for the New York Review of Books. Annalisa Quinn for the New York Times: "affectionate and fun, but bloodless." AK Blakemore: Lennon could've done better than this. Goodreads dug it.
