Let’s first begin with the characters. This is where I find the book to be most disinteresting.
Telemachus is one of the first characters we are introduced to and he is by far the most interesting. He laments the fact that he pales in comparison to his father and lacks the strength or conviction to kick the suitors out. He must soon become the “man of the house” and take charge of his inheritance, something he fears he cannot do. This could have been made into an interesting plot line where he must become the man he needs to be and find some strength within himself. Possibly dealing with feelings of inadequacy and suffering some loss along his journey, and in the end he could learn to endure the hardest of times through grit and a merry demeanor. He could not only be an interesting character that way, but he could also speak to the hardships of men today and show that everyone has the capacity to overcome their insecurities. He could be an icon of strength, keeping a pure smile in hardship and dealing with his issues proactively rather. Instead, we got a journey and a proclamation of “you’re a man now” that had about the same impact as the seaweed mustache “now that we’re men” scene from the Spongebob movie.
Odysseus is not much better. He has no bad qualities to speak of and is always the best at everything. Essentially a textbook “Mary Sue” character. He is never matched in strength, cunning or intelligence unless the person he is contending with is literally a god’s son, sometimes even besting them, too. He always took the moral high ground and never did anything wrong. He is to amazing that Godesses want to get with him like this is some middle schooler’s fan fiction. Overall, an extremely boring character without quirks or flaws.
The antagonistic characters, such as Polyphemus, Eurymachus, Antinous, and Melanthius, are also rather bland. They all serve to embody all the bad characteristics of man and to be “evil and stuff”. None of them really showed any depth at all, rather, they were shallower than a roadside ditch. All of them only served to give us characters to hate and to paste Odysseus in a better light.
The pacing and structure of the book, while terrible, is not as glaringly awful as the characters are. Many times I found that new and important details of the plot were showing up randomly and then proceeded to break the pacing by explaining it. The scar on Odysseus’ leg is by far the worst example, introducing itself and requiring a page of backstory before returning to the event at hand. The drug “moly” is another example. It shows up out of the blue, gives some backstory, and turns out to be some wonder drug that Odysseus needs right now. Instead of, say, having an old man give it to him as a reward for some deed or having a crew member inexplicably find some on the ground and try to make a buck off of it in the mainland. It would still be incomprehensibly stupid to have some miracle substance solve all their problems, but it could have been handled far better. In addition to not establishing any important items or events beforehand, Chekhov's gun is not used at all. Chekhov’s gun states that if there is a rifle on the wall in act 1, it should go off in act 3. Essentially, do not introduce anything that is not meaningful to the story. Unfortunately, a vast majority of this book is exposition, talking about major events that took place or the achievements of people that just go on and on and on about stuff that is not conducive to the plot at all. The most annoying thing to me, however, was the SUBTLE FORESHADOWING in the book. By “SUBTLE FORESHADOWING”, I of course mean that it was not at all subtle. There were mentions of The Odyssey’s end by the first few books and as it went on, prophecies foretold of the ending and the narrator even outright tells you how the book ends at some points when he speaks of the arrows in the quiver after the competition. Overall, the book hinted at its ending very subtly https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RVAhW4ToLFI .
In conclusion, I was expecting a literary masterpiece out of The Odyssey, but I was extremely disappointed.
