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] 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.
The book is crass, quick-witted, and dialogue-heavy, making it a quick read to boot ... While I’m sure history buffs will get some extra layers of entertainment, rest assured that even for someone like me who is woefully bad at history and has never taken much interest in Greek or Roman stories, it’s still a hoot.
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.
