Some people are bored by the first half of the book, filled as it is with genealogies and place names. I loved that. It is Mythology at its finest, where every hero, every location, every event is connected through three degrees of separation with every other one. (This is actually a fun game for mythology buffs.)
Once the story gets flowing most of it was already quite intimately known to me, leading to me noticing all the little differences between Homer’s and Virgil’s versions and Fry’s. That’s not to say that that’s a problem. Fry tells the story in a wonderfully consistent way. His voice is relaxed, warm and understanding of his audience. He’s astounded as we are, even bored on occasion and realises that we will never remember all the names, places and minor events.
I really enjoyed this book as I did Mythos and Heroes and I am looking forward to the next instalment, hopefully containing the nostoi, the Mycenaean tragedies and possibly the story of Aeneas.
One last thing about this book: in my review of Heroes I praised the fact that the book had both a table of contents and an index, making individual stories easy to find. Mythos had neither. Troy has an index, but lacks a table of contents. For the life of me I can’t understand why.