Set in Syracuse, Sicily, during the Peloponnesian War but told in contemporary Irish dialect, Glorious Exploits follows Lampo and Gelon, best friends since childhood. Thrilled to have survived the Athenians' recent invasion and as shocked by the Syracusan victory as everyone else, these unemployed potters are in a mood to celebrate. Of course, they hate the Athenians. Still, that doesn't mean you can't love the theatre of their great playwright Euripides, does it? Realizing that if the Athenians are as doomed as everyone says, this might be their last chance to hear Euripides's poetry, they go down to the quarry where the Athenian prisoners are being held and offer extra rations to any prisoner who can recite his work, a decision that sets into motion an extraordinary series of events.
[A] remarkable debut novel ... It is a story of a wounded world in which art allows at least the possibility of healing ... Lennon gives us enslaved people with their humanity intact. It is striking that, in contrast with the common practice among novelists who set their works in classical times, he is careful to ensure that most slaves are named and all are given a backstory ... There is no soft landing on the comfort of mutual redemption through art. Sympathy has to be quarried from this horror like stone hewn from the rock face ... Within this harsh realism, Lennon finds room for playfulness. He does so largely by layering his own Irishness over the classical narrative ... although it conjures an engrossing ancient Greek world, it also makes us feel like its story is happening now. The archaic melds with the immediate ... Lennon’s achievement is to make the Irish inflections seem so natural that they become unremarkable. He does not apply them with a heavy hand—the language he has forged for Lampo moves deftly between the demotic and the dramatic. It is vulgar enough to be enjoyably earthy but sufficiently dexterous to rise without strain into moments of high emotion and serious thought ... Euripides tried to warn his fellow citizens that their democracy would not survive if it became pitiless. By bringing that truth so fiercely alive, Lennon has given us a fiction that does not remain safely historical.
[A] thrilling and heartbreaking debut novel ... a stunning (and stunningly fun) meditation on companionship, humanity and the role of performance in keeping us all afloat ... Most everyone in Glorious Exploits is eternally trying on new personas and attuning them to the audience at hand. In time, that jovial creativity yields an underlying darkness; there can be morbid consequences when we step outside of ourselves to withstand the impossible ... Sometimes grief is so profound that the only thing to do is proclaim it, in our own halting ways, to heaven and earth — even if those proclamations themselves cause more grief.
Breezy, winning ... Lennon’s vernacular gives the novel a shambolic charm, a story told in a Dublin bar by a drunk lurching between poetry and obscenity ... The middle of the novel is essentially a buddy comedy ... This is all fun — I first read the novel in one happy sitting, on a plane — but Lennon attempts to go deeper, with mixed success. One sign of ambition is his choice of play ... This setup...promises an interesting experiment about reversal, sympathy, and power. But instead, the novel seems to assert rather than show or interrogate its central idea, a vague one about the power of storytelling — a phrase that makes me feel like a dutiful A.P. English student.
