Harry Mount’s Odyssey review – in the wake of Homer’s hero

This re-creation of Odysseus’s convoluted route home from Troy is a study in self-deprecation that wears its learning lightly

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. Harry Mount was a member of the Bullingdon club, writes for the Daily Mail and the Spectator, and a cynic could say that he might have achieved at least some of his success due to, in its oldest and most literal sense, patronage (his father is the excellent Ferdinand Mount). He is not too distantly related to David Cameron. In this book he quotes the controversial Spectator columnist Taki without censure. And – this is the most damning thing – he edited the book The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson. That alone should have been enough for me to consign Harry Mount’s Odyssey to the cleansing fire; but I couldn’t because this is a thoroughly charming and interesting, if at times a little exasperating, book.

In it, Mount more or less – we don’t know for certain, and the scholarly consensus shifts constantly – follows Odysseus’s convoluted route back from Troy to Ithaca. Mount does not have any special or “authentic” way of doing this: previous literary travellers have sailed round the Mediterranean in a replica of a bronze-age ship or on a raft, but Mount does so on the MV Corinthian, a cruise liner (or “floating gin palace”, as he puts it), with his parents. NB: Mount is in his 40s and is fully aware of the bathos of this, even going so far as to cite Ronnie Corbett’s sitcom Sorry!, about a middle-aged man still living with his mother.

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