'The Lost Books of the Odyssey' by Zachary Mason and 'No-Man's Land' by Scott Huler

A Novel

Zachary Mason

Starcherone Books: 228 pp., $16 paper

No-Man's Lands

One Man's Odyssey Through "The Odyssey"

Scott Huler

Crown: 286 pp., $24.95

"IN fact," writes Zachary Mason, as if anyone could doubt him, "there have been innumerable Trojan wars." And how could he be wrong? What era has been free of stupid wars that threaten not to end, or of the stupid, stubborn kings who start them? (So much staked for handsome Helen? Come on, there must have been oil under Troy!) Little comfort to the Trojans, or to those outside the Green Zone, but wars do end eventually. Heroes and villains, should they survive, sail home. Some make it. Some don't. And some, even once home, never quite return. "And if you find her poor," quipped Constantine Cavafy, cruelly, "Ithaca has not defrauded you."

Wars. Journeys. Monsters. Storms. An angry god. A visit with the dead. A faithful or unfaithful spouse. A destination that recedes, apparently infinitely, the closer you get. "The Odyssey" provides fodder for a story or two, some high-minded metaphoric play, a nest of clichés if things go awry. "Inevitably," Mason continues, "each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors." So Virgil reads Homer, pilfers what he can and lets Aeneas, a Trojan, found Rome. Ovid picks up Homer's pen and hands it to Penelope. (The first of his Heroides is a letter from Odysseus/Ulysses' wife to her tardy mate: "You were careful, I'm sure, to always think first of me.") Lucian sends Ulysses to the moon. Dante grants him a glimpse of purgatory, then drops him in hell.

Eventually, Homer -- and Odysseus -- would become something like a beginning, the myth at the origin of the West's many myths. "I am become a name," Tennyson wrote of the questing hero, whose archetype he helped cement. James Joyce, from what I understand, also got involved.

Joyce casts a long shadow, but Odysseus' wanderings did not stop with "Ulysses." He left a trail of salt and sand across Ezra Pound's "Cantos." Louis Aragon abducted Odysseus' son, tender Telemachus, subjecting him to a novella of Dada high jinks. Unfazed, Odysseus climbed in bed with the poet Cavafy, with Nikos Kazantzakis, with Robert Graves. Derek Walcott reimagined him in the Caribbean. Pop has not neglected him: See the Coen brothers, Sting, "The Simpsons."