Before I See The Odyssey

This weekend, I am going to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in the cinema, which feels like precisely the sort of film for which cinemas were invented: ships, monsters, gods, storms and Matt Damon looking as though the journey home has involved several regrettable changes at Crewe. Nolan's film brings Homer's foundational epic to the screen as a vast mythic action story, filmed for the full IMAX experience.

There is, however, a small difficulty.

I have never read Homer.

I consider myself reasonably well read. I have read Russians who required family trees, Victorians who required patience and theologians who required both. Yet Homer has remained on that distinguished shelf marked "one day," alongside learning Italian and properly understanding pensions.

I know the outline, of course: Troy, Odysseus, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Penelope, and a journey home that makes the replacement-bus service look efficient. But knowing the cultural furniture is not quite the same as entering the house.

The obvious answer is to read the poem itself, and Homer has never been more approachable. Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey — the first English translation by a woman — renders the epic in clean, swift iambic pentameter that moves like a story being told rather than a monument being reverently preserved. Wilson does not pretend that reading a three-thousand-year-old epic is a normal weekend errand. She simply makes it surprisingly difficult to stop once you have begun. Her Odysseus is a complicated man trying to get home. Her Penelope thinks. For anyone who has spent years meaning to read Homer, this is the door that actually opens.

The film has also made me think about two more recent journey books I have loved.

Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway follows two brothers setting out across 1950s America, only for their planned journey west to be diverted east. It is a road novel full of detours, companions, competing stories and the suspicion that the destination may not be the real point. It became a number-one New York Times bestseller and sold more than a million copies.

Then there is David Grann's The Wager, the gripping true story of shipwreck, survival, mutiny and the battle to decide whose version of events becomes history. It spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list—and sits knowingly within a tradition of sea journeys stretching back to Homer.