Stephen Fry. Odyssey. Vol. 4 of Stephen Fry’s Greek Myths. London: Penguin Books, 2025. ISBN 9781405948425

Arthur Schopenhauer once said that the art of not reading is the most important art of all. Most books are rubbish, he explained, and reading them is degrading to the mind. They are written to flatter or mislead the public, and the public—being composed largely of fools—laps them up. “He who writes for fools,” Schopenhauer added, “always finds a large public.” I cannot think of a more exact description of Stephen Fry’s Odyssey, or better advice for what to do with it.

This is the fourth in his Greek Myths series. The others have sold in bulk and will be forgotten in bulk. They are bought at airports and Waterstones 3-for-2 tables. They are wrapped at Christmas, flicked through in January, and shelved in February. The readers tell themselves that they have “done the Greeks.” They have done no such thing. They have wasted time.

The Iliad and Odyssey are the founding works of our civilisation. They are poems of war, loss, exile, and return. The hero of The Odyssey is a liar, a man of cunning and cruelty, but also a survivor who longs for home. The Homeric poems have come to us out of the Bronze Age. They have survived the collapse of at least two civilisations, and will survive the collapse of our own. They survive because they are already perfect. The hexameters carry an austere music. Their formulaic epithets—“ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,” “πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς,” “δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς”—are the memory-tricks of a sung tradition, but they also give the poems a dignity that no one who reads them can ever forget. Like The Iliad, The Odyssey was not written to be read in comfort with a cup of tea. It was composed to be chanted in smoky halls to men who might be dead tomorrow.

Stephen Fry knows none of this. Or if he knows it, he does not care. His Odyssey is Homer without the difficulty. It is Homer stripped of his grandeur, reduced to banter and “relatable” anecdotes. The Observer praised it for bringing “contemporary relevance” to the myths. That line is damning enough. Homer does not need contemporary relevance. A book that has spoken to audiences across three thousand years already possesses the only relevance that matters. To make Homer relevant is to make him trivial.

The Guardian called the book “relatable and full of humour.” Again, the praise condemns. Relatable? Homer is not relatable. The world he describes is harsh and alien. His heroes live by honour and die by the sword. They weep like children and sacrifice to gods who may or may not answer. That strangeness is the point. It is what makes Homer worth reading. To make him “relatable” is to gut him of meaning.

The Irish Independent calls Fry “A born storyteller.” This blurb, like the others, is the language of people who cannot read. No serious critic would praise a reteller of Homer as “a born storyteller,” as if the original poet were not the greatest storyteller of them all. These blurbs are not criticism. They are advertising slogans. And they work. The book is a bestseller.

Why, then, is Fry’s book a bestseller? Not because of merit. It sells because of Stephen Fry himself. For thirty years, he has been cultivated as a “national treasure.” He is the ideal leftist intellectual: clever enough to appear learned, shallow enough never to disturb. He quotes Wilde, sprinkles in Latin tags, and sprinkles them badly. His claque tells us that he is bipolar, gay, witty, and charming. He is on panel shows, chat shows, and literary festivals. He is always agreeable, always moderate, and always applauded.

Fry has built a career on the fact that the English middle classes like to feel cultured without effort. They want Plato without philosophy, Shakespeare without metre, Wagner without subversion, Homer without Greek. They want to be reassured that the classics are not difficult or dangerous, but fun. Fry gives them what they want. He domesticates the wild. He reduces epic to anecdote. He packages civilisation as entertainment.

It is not enough to call this dumbing down. It is worse. Dumbing down implies a reduction in complexity. What Fry does is not simplification but falsification. The Odyssey is not a sequence of funny stories about gods and monsters. It is about endurance and the fragility of human life under the indifference of the divine. To make it “funny” is to destroy it. It is as if someone rewrote the Inferno as a travel blog or recast the Iliad as a football commentary. The whole point of the work is lost.

Popularity, however, is not a defence. It is an indictment. Books that sell by the million are almost always worthless. They are consumed because they flatter the prejudices of the public. They make readers feel clever without having to be clever. They make them feel cultured without culture. They are the literary equivalent of processed food: cheap, sweet, addictive, fattening.

What, then, is the harm? Why not let people have their Fry and be happy? So what if his writing is as inconsequential as his suicide attempts? The harm is that time is short. Every hour spent on Stephen Fry is an hour not spent on Homer. It is an hour subtracted from Gibbon, Johnson, or Shakespeare. It is an hour less of life. The opportunity cost is everything. Bad books are not neutral. They are parasites. They feed on the hours that might have been spent on good ones.

Even together, both Homeric poems are not long. A determined reader can finish them in a few evenings. Translations are plentiful and accessible: Chapman for majesty, Lattimore for accuracy, Fagles for readability. Why should anyone waste time on Fry? Because Fry is easy. Because Fry is “funny.” Because Fry gives the illusion of culture without the labour. That illusion is worse than ignorance. The ignorant man may still be saved. The man who thinks Fry is Homer is lost.

Fry’s Odyssey is a symptom of a larger sickness. We live in a culture of substitutes. Instead of music, we have entertainment. Instead of education, we have training. Instead of religion, we have therapy. And instead of Homer, we have Stephen Fry. The substitutes are not meant to enrich but to anaesthetise. They keep the public distracted, and therefore docile. They prevent the shock of encountering greatness. A civilisation that prefers Fry to Homer is a civilisation that has given up.

The lesson is clear. Do not read Stephen Fry’s Odyssey. Do not buy it for yourself, do not buy it for your children, do not buy it as a Christmas gift. Leave it to rot on the bestseller table. If you want Homer, read Homer. If you cannot read Greek, read a translation. If you cannot manage a translation, read a summary. But do not read Fry. His book is not Homer, not even close. It is a parody of Homer, a reduction of Homer, an obliteration of Homer.

Life is short. Every page wasted on Fry is a page stolen from the real thing. The copy my aunt has given me for my birthday is already skimmed with disgust and thrown into the dustbin: it is too disgusting for the charity shops.

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