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blade must be of a certain width and length and must be single edged to avoid injury to innocent bystanders after he is sent away by a discomfited agamemnon menelaus sneers at the smith for being unable to rise above petty details no vision menelaus said bolshie too he was talking as if one victim were as good an another it s this new class of technicians they have no respect for authority no sense of tradition p 150 two characters defy the amoral social climate calchas is agamemnon s diviner whose role is to interpret the omens he s an honest man and he s wise he sees through the plans of the conspirators but he does not dare confront the powers that be because he sees where this is heading he s old and he s weak and he has a more politically astute rival called croton who says what his co conspirators want to hear then there is sisipyla slave girl gifted to iphigeneia she is illiterate but she is smarter than her mistress and more honourable too iphigeneia is a product of her society she is also status conscious keen to improve her rank and wealth and only too ready to believe the ruse that lures her to aulis i e that achilles wants to marry her even though they ve never set eyes on each other sisipyla also has a greater sense of the presence of artemis the goddess that iphigeneia serves she feels her presence in the environment rather than in man made structures such as the temple ominously sisipyla also closely resembles iphigeneia i ve read the odyssey and the iliad more than once and i grew up on roger lancelyn green s tales of the greek heroes so i enjoyed unsworth s inversion of the familiar heroic values and heroic characters odysseus is a villain intent on grasping loot in any way he can to make up for the fact that he s not the success he d like to be he s just as wily and manipulative as he is in outwitting his foes in the odyssey but he s greedy and power hungry achilles handsome and strong is an arrogant prat in love with himself menelaus has gathered together a magnificent fleet ostensibly to restore his honour which he goes on about ad nauseam but really because the economy is desperately in need of a large injection of loot croton is personified as a nazi leading chants and raised arm salutes and nestor is senile and the singer far from any homeric persona merely mouths phony slogans to suit his political masters odysseus is the nastiest of them all he visits agamemnon for maintenance sessions to ensure he doesn t weaken in his resolve to kill his daughter it was a question really of substituting terms and in a way odysseus enjoyed the intellectual stimulus these encounters with the king provided on the one hand there was the desire for power and loot and on the other the deliberate killing of an innocent if you softened the first by mixing in notions of public service the need for living space and wider markets to serve a growing population and submerged the second in the heavy burden of command the problem ceased to exist they became the same thing they blended into a single notion of painful duty how agamemnon loved it this painful duty how he drank it in how it soothed him therapy really of course after a while things started to slide apart again and the king became confused and sometimes gasped for air then some further restoration work was required he was coming from the king s tent after one such maintenance session on his way to check up on the singer when he had this thought and it stopped him in his tracks it was just a question of concepts it came to him like a shaft of light it was all conceptual the driving force in human society was not greed or the lust for power as he had always thought but the energy generated by juggling with concepts endlessly striving to make perceptions of reality agree with them to melt things together iron out problems harmonise warring elements what was the phrase he was looking for eliminate the contradictions they would rule the world who knew this and used it pp 155 6 yup that s how it works ps unsworth s sacred hunger 1992 has been in my collection of booker prize winners for ages but my ongoing project to read all the bookers has stalled a bit notetoself get on with it update 12 8 26 you may also be interested in my post about other retellings of ancient myth see here i read this book at this time for 20booksof winter hosted by annabel to see my progress click here author barry unsworth 1930 2012 title the songs of the kings publisher hamish hamilton 2002 cover image bibliothèque nationale paris isbn 9780241137017 hbk 1st edition 245 pages source personal library share this share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on mastodon opens in new window mastodon share on threads opens in new window threads share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp like loading cast away 2026 by francesca de tores august 6 2026 august 7 2026 lisa hill 10 comments apologies to readers who saw a prematurely published fragment of this review francesca de tores was an author new to me when i read saltblood 2024 her first novel published here in australia after she had spent many years as a writer poet and academic in the uk as i wrote in my review of saltblood goodreads provides the titles of her previous novels as francesca haig she is the author of four novels the most recent the cookbook of common prayer was published in 2021 her post apocalyptic fire sermon trilogy is published in more than 20 languages the first novel the fire sermon was published in 2015 followed by the map of bones in 2016 and concluding with the forever ship in 2017 alas my libraries have none of them but they do have saltblood and now cast away alexander in his goatskins waits for rescue in this 1885 statue by thomas stuart burnett it is sited in selkirk s birthplace of lower largo in scotland like daniel defoe s classic tale of robinson crusoe 1719 cast away is also inspired by the true story of alexander selkirk a privateer who was marooned on the island of más a tierra in the south pacific ocean more than 65 km off the coast of chile he was there wholly alone for four years and four months defoe s novel was an adventure novel of its time and today is critiqued for crusoe s colonisation of the island the reader encounters issues of slavery and cannibalism which were not part of selkirk s experience and it also does not deal with his experience of existential loneliness because of the companionship of friday a tribesman who is rescued and then enslaved and civilised by crusoe cast away however is mostly based on factual events from contemporaneous sources including a book from 1712 by selkirk s rescuer woodes rogers which details the methods by which he survived and a journal article by richard steele a year later based on his meeting with selkirk the story begins in the early 18th century when in 1704 selkirk was abandoned by his shipmates on a remote island visited only by passing ships when they are in desperate need of resupply the small island has nothing much to offer except wild goats and cats and an abundance of rats but there is fresh water and a harbour which facilitates access by boat only the most resourceful of castaways could survive it so when we read of the paucity of resources that selkirk had at his disposal and the cynicism with which his crewmates joked about the desperation of his situation we realise that we are in a very different world where life was cheap whatever the circumstances that led to his abandonment it was more than a cruel punishment it was thought to be a sentence of death unlike the trained survivalists in the alone franchise selkirk does not have an axe or a saw he has no fishing net or hooks he has no light and after a disaster with his flint he has no option but to adopt the twirling stick method of starting a fire that he had by chance heard from the english privateer william dampier with whom he had sailed before he has a change of clothes in his sea chest a blanket a flint and steel a musket with an inadequate supply of powder and bullets a kettle a mug a knife and a marlinspike some money and his now useless navigational tools i resolve that before i die here alone i shall carve some kind of plaque that will read here died the unfortunate alexander selkirk navigator who knew precisely where he was but not how to leave p 9 he spends the first three days of his abandonment blind drunk on the cask of flip that they ve given him i ve never read the adult version of robinson crusoe but the plot summary at wikipedia suggests that it doesn t wrestle with the terror of loneliness as cast away does here if i die i am lost to all knowing the rats will have my flesh and the wind will scour my unburied bones and no record will ever hold my name nor tell the story of my passing it would be a dying more complete than any other p 20 as time goes by and finds ways of meeting his physical needs the existential issues arise i had thought that the great question of my time here would be how to survive that has been answered well enough and i do not fear starvation nor wild beasts no the great question i must answer here is who is a man when all the things that make up his life are stripped away no not just any man but who is alexander selkirk without his troublesome family nor his shipboard duties nor even a tot of rum who remains p 88 snip i did not know that other men are a mirror when you live amongst people you are always seen i did not know what a deal of work is done by that witnessing how a man is shaped by those expectations and responses so that he may measure himself against those who surround him p89 tom hanks as noland with wilson in the film cast away starring tom hanks noland endures four years alone on a island after a plane crash with only the companionship of a volleyball which he personifies as wilson what makes cast away the novel much more than an adventure story of survival begins in part ii where the old goat makes a most surprising entrance into selkirk s tent good morning sir says the goat i trust i find you in better health i scramble to my knees unleashing a torrent of cursing and knocking over a jug of water if you must curse says the goat you will oblige me by doing so more quietly for a goat s ears are much more acute than a man s you need to understand that i have seen many strange things i have seen a man dying of scurvy whose teeth grew so loose that when he coughed they flew across the deck and scattered on the floor like so many dice i have seen a man so crazed with fever that he took a notion that he could fly and climbed over the gunwale to fall to his death smiling all the while i have seen a rat whelp a litter of pups and then eat them one at a time while the living ones yet suckled another thing that you must understand is that the goat s voice permits no doubt he speaks perfectly clear and with great authority there is nothing goatish about his voice and it has no bleating tone he speaks with such gravity that one cannot do otherwise than take him seriously his voice and indeed his haughty way of holding his head make it very plain that to doubt him would be an insult to his dignity p 93 the goat introduces itself as the reverend vicarious cronch but the cat refuses to give a name so selkirk names it sleek you might think that the advent of a second speaking beast would send me into paroxysms of fear or disbelief in fact the opposite is true the one follows the other so that all of a sudden both seem more ordinary a speaking goat alone is a marvel when a cat speaks also suddenly it seems as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world to converse with beasts p 95 as selkirk must the reader goes along with it too but sleek and the reverend are more than a clever device to introduce selkirk s backstory to the reader the dialogue between selkirk the amoral cat and the voice of religion enable him to interrogate his past and acknowledge his own responsibility for his fate and in the process selkirk is revealed as a much more complex man and both more and less culpable for his sins highly recommended flips were invented for sailors in england and were made from a mixture of ale rum molasses and whole egg source https drunkardsalmanac com the flip cocktail author francesca de tores title cast away or the surprising adventures of alexander selkirk publisher bloomsbury 2026 design by carmen r balit woodcut images from look and learn the children s magazine that i read as a child isbn 9781526661449 pbk 324 pages review copy courtesy of bloomsbury australia image credits wearing goatskins selkirk awaits rescue in a sculpture by thomas stuart burnett 1885 by sylvia stanley own work cc by sa 3 0 https commons wikimedia org w index php curid 8051043 clip from the film cast away tom hanks as noland with the volleyball wilson https movieweb com cast away tom hanks injury share this share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on mastodon opens in new window mastodon share on threads opens in new window threads share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp like loading the hungry and the fat 2018 by timur vermes translated by jamie bulloch august 6 2026 august 13 2026 lisa hill right on cue as i was finishing the last chapters of this book there was another migrant crisis in europe proving that whatever else about it timur vermes the hungry and the fat is topical but while the book at 560 pages is long my review is going to be brief because i ve spent too much time on this book already and august is whizzing by with the window for finishing 20booksofwinter whizzing along with it spoilers alert the novel is a heavy handed satire of geopolitical responses to the never ending stream of refugees from africa europe has closed its borders and the world s largest refugee camp is marooned somewhere unspecified in africa an airhead celebrity reality star visits to make a tv program about it falls in love with one of the refugees and when he realises that her impulse to stay with him forever means he ll never get out of the camp he organises 150 000 carefully selected fit and photogenic refugees to walk to germany he succeeds in this with a combination of his own good management plus thuggery from his pal mojo so the ratings go through the roof aided and abetted by an ambitious journalist who writes the kind of dross we see in weekend glossy magazines all the countries they walk through facilitate their entry because they know the refugees are just passing through and a...
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