412BC. Syracuse, Sicily. Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon is a wild ride and something of a surprise. There is the ancient setting, rattling modern dialogue and irreverent humour, a combination of ancient Syracusans and Athenians, and the tragi-comedy double act of Lampo and Gelon who decide to stage Medea with a cast of half-starved enemy soldiers. Such a distinctive voice from the first paragraph, the story moves quickly, initially disorientating until the dialogue rhythm settled in my head and I went with the flow. With a flick of a word, Lennon turns the mood from funny to sad to hopeless, to consoling, to hopeful, to drunken to horror and pain. Lampo the narrator is not a sympathetic character, at times downright unpleasant but the story becomes addictive.
Syracuse, post-war is a city that cannot escape the memories of battle. Men walk the street with amputations and visible injuries, loved ones are dead, jobs are scarce, hundreds of Athenian soldiers are held captive in a quarry while out at sea beneath the surface are shipwrecks. ‘The sea-skins a gentle swishing blue, and it’s hard to imagine that whole forests of sunken ships lie underneath it, a second city.’ The war in question is the Peloponnesian War of 415-413BC when Athens fought the combined forces of Sparta, Syracuse and Corinth, and lost. But all is not well in Syracuse either. In Glorious Exploits, Lampo and Gelon are out-of-work potters, they raise funds for their theatre production by selling a heap of Athenian armour they find. Driven by Gelon’s love of Euripides and Lampo’s need of gold, the unlikely theatre production approaches. Costumes designed, actors auditioned, lines learned, music rehearsed. Are Gelon and Lampo a team, truly co-directors, or just two ordinary men out of their depth.
There are funny moments and episodes of horrific cruelty and ignorance. Via the ambition, idealism and naivety of these two potters, Glorious Exploits shows the impact of war on ordinary people – the foot soldiers, the angry grieving families left behind, the men on both sides following the orders of officers who escape – long after the fighting has stopped and surface wounds have healed. An enemy becomes another man just following orders. Damage hidden below the surface may, like the wrecked ships, be out of sight but it is still there and when unleashed, the unexpected can happen.
A unique voice. Something completely different.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Silence of the Girls’ by Pat Barker
‘Stone Blind’ by Natalie Haynes
‘The Wolf Den’ by Elodie Harper #1WolfDen

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GLORIOUS EXPLOITS by Ferdia Lennon https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7OP via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:-