After the decades-long assault by despotic Persia on the allied Greek states, the Greeks finally defeated their massive enemy. Now, in the ancient Mediterranean world of Life After Death at Ipsambul, war is imminent among the Greeks. Arion, the only child of a wealthy mercantile family on idyllic Lesbos, had the education and security to evolve into a poetic soul. As a boy growing into a man, he is thrust into a violent world while his unscrupulous uncle is running the family estate. To survive, he must adjust and overcome injustice and cruelty. This novel comprises Arion’s experiences: while traveling to Sidon from Damaskos as a child with his father; departing from Mytilene on Lesbos to sail south on the Aegean Sea as a juvenile; traveling up the Nile to Ipsambul; then returning to Greece as a young adult, and at last arriving in glorious Athens (during the Age of Perikles) two years before the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. On his journey, he finds that the surprising puzzle of life allows romance and religion only in portions of reality, hope, and fantasy. The novel spans twelve years, ending in 433 BC.
To assist potential readers in making good choices about whether or not to purchase any of the four volumes of Arion’s Odyssey, I offer the following additional information about this tetralogy, which is set in Classical Greece, with the city-state (polis) of Athens as one protagonist and Arion (a human) as the other.
Each volume of Arion’s Odyssey is a combination of historical novel, ancient travelogue, ancient poetry, mythology, religion, and history. If you would enjoy a saga as detailed as Melville’s Moby-Dick, as kaleidoscopic as Michener’s Iberia, and as expansive as Hugo’s Les Misérables, you might love this tetralogy.
Regarding Athens and its empire, the following portion of each novel is similar to an ancient travelogue: one third of Life After Death at Ipsambul (volume 1); one fifth of Aegean Fire (volume 2); one tenth of Beyond the Battle of Naupaktos (volume 3); one tenth of Return to Lesbos (volume 4).
Set in the ancient Mediterranean world, Arion’s Odyssey is an adult story about Arion, a sensitive Greek (boy becoming a man) from a wealthy mercantile family on the Greek island of Lesbos. It begins fourteen years prior to the inception of the Peloponnesian War, and ends during that war: it spans the period from 445 BC to 427 BC.
If you would like to experience life in the ancient Mediterranean world, then you will probably enjoy this adult story about coming-of-age there.
Assessment:
The author creates a somewhat dry and slow moving, though informative, living history in this novel that follows the formative years of Arion, the son of a Greek merchant, who embarks on a life-changing trip up the Nile to Ipsambul. Often, the action of the story is not focused on the characters themselves. Instead Sten describes structures, hieroglyphics, and uses his characters as didactic mouthpieces, as if the characters themselves are merely incidental to the historical events that surround them. Though heavy handed at first, the plot picks up near the end, where we as readers are left to wait for a sequel.
Date Submitted: July 15, 2016
From Sten (Mine, 2010) comes a historical novel concerning a boy named Arion and his adventures in the ancient world.
It is 439 B.C.E. when Arion, a Greek boy of 12, sets sail from Mytilene with his merchant father, Periandros. Heading south across the Aegean Sea, their vessel passes islands such as Chios and Samos, allowing father and son the opportunity to reflect on The Odyssey. Such is the case when the two pass ships off of Samos (“Arion remembers that Homer compares to a quadriga the fifty-two-oared Phaiakian galley that carried Odysseus homeward from Scheria Island”). Nothing, however, can compare to the excitement of Egypt (“Unlike any other land on earth, Egypt is a surprise, an intoxicating dichotomy, a verdant plain eight to sixteen kilometers wide and nine hundred seventy kilometers long, watered and nurtured by a river that is usually more than a kilometer wide, in the midst of one of earth’s most inhospitable regions—the driest, nearly hottest, desert”). After taking in many of the sites of this alluring land, the eager travelers find that fate becomes grossly less kind. During celebrations for Arion’s 13th birthday, a group of marauders attacks with deadly consequences. What will it mean for Arion’s future when his world is so suddenly, and brutally, shattered? Taking quite a few pages to get to that event, the book does not always deliver the most gripping prose. One example arrives in a description of how Arion and his father become tired when finishing their evening meal: “After an empty stomach is satisfied, and night falls, though sleep is resisted by an active mind and imagination, the body demands it, and the two deck lamps are too dim to resist the darkness.” Items of the ancient world are, however, explained in efficient fashion, including the symbolic importance of scarabs to the Egyptians: “So often in Egypt one can see myriad baby beetles emerge like magic from a ball of dung….It is life from nothing, life from muck!” These sentiments, combined with the violent second half of the story, create a complex image of the period that is vibrant with mythmaking but also seared by the constant possibility of terror.
Slow-paced in the first part, the novel nevertheless provides plenty of action scenes and enticing details.
