Everyone’s a Homer Expert Now

If you’ve been living under a rock this week, you might have missed that Christopher Nolan released a film of the Odyssey last Friday. Which was nice. But then, by roughly Saturday lunchtime, it seemed like the entire internet had studied Classics at Oxford.

It’s actually been a pretty eye-opening experience. On Thursday there were all these people with normal jobs and typical opinions about traffic and the cost of groceries, and then, by the weekend, literally the whole world had opinions about the film’s fidelity to the Homeric text. Amusingly, Den of Geek found that most of the VERY ANGRY purists were holding up 2004’s Troy as the gloriously faithful version whose beloved memory this newcomer has besmirched, which is a… take about a film that cut out ALL THE GODS.

And the complaints have kept coming. There’s been “dad-gate” (Telemachus says “dad” in the film, and it seems a significant portion of the internet would prefer their Bronze Age Ithacans to observe Edwardian forms of address). And there’s been people driving across state lines for 3am IMAX screenings of a poem they wouldn’t have picked up off a train seat the week before. And in Chicago, the National Hellenic Museum staged an actual mock trial, with real lawyers, to determine whether the slaughter of the suitors could be seen as murder. I mean, sure. For twenty-eight centuries people have been talking about this moment but, yeah, Jeff from your five-a-side WhatsApp has it all nailed down.

Okay. So I’m being a bit snide about it all - shock - but no-one can possibly deny that sales of translations of the Odyssey are up 76% this year. Library e-book checkouts are up 217% and audiobook listens are up more than 300%. Emily Wilson’s translation (my personal view: meh) has now shifted a million copies in the US alone, and at the New York Public Library her edition accounts for ninety percent of the print holds. Wilson herself went to see Nolan’s film and didn’t much rate it (the moment with Argos she called “pandering of the highest order,”), but she told people to go see it anyway.

So it turns out that the most unhinged, culture-wary discourse of the summer is also the largest mass reading event of the year. Who knew? A 2,800-year-old adventure poem is outselling pretty much everything in the middle of an epic reading recession.

And the reason ain’t rocket science.

In 1940, A. J. Jenkinson published a survey of what British boys actually enjoyed reading and the answer was action, adventure and thrillers. And in 1997 Christine Hall and Martin Coles ran the largest survey of children’s reading choices since, and the answer was… yep, boys are still all about the adventure. What’s most interesting is that between those two dates sits most of a century, a world war, the paperback, television, the games console and the internet, and the boys’ answer to what they liked reading did not move an iota.

What boys want to read is stories of men doing dangerous things far from home. This is about as close to a fixed constant as anything reading research owns, and the Odyssey (a grizzled veteran with a boat problem lying his way home past a cyclops, a witch and a whirlpool) sits so squarely inside that preference that it’s scary.

And matching boys to things they want to read is the best-evidenced lever to improve book engagement we have. A 2023 meta-analysis of forty reading-motivation interventions found that triggering interest was the one mechanism that consistently moved both motivation and comprehension. Nolan has basically just run that intervention on several million adults, by accident, with a $250 million budget.

And all of this fits with something the National Literacy Trust’s audiobook work keeps telling us. Boys might trail girls on enjoyment of reading (45.6% against 55.9%), but they actually lead them on enjoyment of listening (45.9% against 41.8%). And the boys who don’t enjoy reading are the group most likely to enjoy listening. The reading gap, in other words, is a gap about print, not about story.

And the Odyssey is not print.

It’s an oral performance that was recited for centuries by professionals working from memory to rooms of people who couldn’t read. And they freely varied the material for the interests of the particular audience. What that means is that every armchair Classicist currently bewailing “the purity of the text” is completely missing the point. The Odyssey’s format is just a bloke holding a room, at length, after dinner. Sound familiar? The 300% spike in audiobook listens isn’t a degraded way into reading. It’s the poem going home. (And the same NLT study found that one in five young people said an audiobook or podcast got them interested in reading books, so the door swings the right way too.)

So when the moaners asks whether Nolan is faithful to the book, the answer is that the book isn’t faithful to the book. The tradition the Odyssey comes from is adaptive all the way down. A “faithful” Odyssey is whichever version holds the room it’s in. This one held a $264 million room in a weekend. So, the man three rows back at the IMAX is not a fraud for meeting Odysseus for the first time at 48 frames a second. He’s doing what audiences of this story have done for twenty-eight centuries, which is hearing it in whatever form his century performs it.

Oh, and if you enjoy my boy’s reading diatribes, can I just take a moment and flag that my The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island is out on the 24th July from the awesome Raconteur Press. It’s the second in my Felix Jones Adventures and is unashamedly written for my son, Josiah, who’s nine years old and just wants to read stories about teenage boys defeating bad guys. Please do buy it for any small person in your life.

Sources

A. J. Jenkinson, What Do Boys and Girls Read? (London: Methuen, 1940).

Christine Hall and Martin Coles, ‘Gendered Readings: Helping Boys Develop as Critical Readers’, Gender and Education, 9.1 (1997), 61–68.

Lisa van der Sande, Roel van Steensel, Suzanne Fikrat-Wevers and Lidia Arends, ‘Effectiveness of Interventions That Foster Reading Motivation: A Meta-Analysis’, Educational Psychology Review, 35.1 (2023).

Constance Steinkuehler, ‘Video Games and Digital Literacies’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54.1 (2010), 61–63.

Emily Best and Christina Clark, The Role of Audiobooks to Engage Reluctant Readers and Underrepresented Children and Young People (London: National Literacy Trust, 2021)

Film coverage and sales data as linked in the text (Den of Geek; AP via Central Oregon Daily; PhillyVoice; AP via Yahoo Entertainment).