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It is 412BC and Lampo and Gelon – Syracusian potters with artistic pretensions – are staging Medea in a stinking, rat-infested quarry where the Athenian army – yesterday’s fearsome invaders – are now rotting in their chains. It is not an auspicious set-up (“even the lizards are hiding, picking their heads out from under rocks and trees as if to say, Apollo, are you fucking joking?”) but it is exactly this seam between heroic aspirations and earthly weaknesses that author Ferdia Lennon mines. At every twist, Lennon slides beauty into scenes of depravity (in the charred ruins of a port town, decimated by war, “the water is black too, but a glistening black, like ringlets in dark flowing hair”) and depravity into budding beauty (Lampo loves, but also tries to buy, a slave girl). Is this debut novel perfect? No. But it vibrates off the page with an energy that divests the classical world of its dusty divinity and brings it suddenly, tangibly, brilliantly close.
Photograph by Conor Horgan