Audio book review: Odysseus – The Greatest Hero of Them All

Planning road trip entertainment has always fallen to me. I always suggest audiobooks, they’re what I know best. Planning a road trip with my partner, I suggested Odysseus – The Greatest Hero of Them All. “What do you mean you’ve never heard of Odysseus?” I exclaimed, slightly incredulously. “You know, siege of Troy, the wooden horse?” She shook her head. “What about Homer? Iliad? The Greek legend?” She looked blank. Okay then, so I guess that means I’m an intellectual. Goodness! If that’s true, then I must confess got it via a most un-intellectual route.

I have written before that as a young teenager I was in the habit of borrowing audiobooks from the local library. None were more prolific in the audiobooks for children’s market than Chivers. One of their releases was Odysseus – The Greatest Hero of Them All.

This audio isn’t nearly as serious as the re-designed cover (available from Audible). For me, the cover for the early Chivers release on tape cassette captures the mood better (see below).

I’m going to invoke the name of a long since cancelled and vaguely remembered programme from the late 1980’s: Fat Tulip’s Garden. It was a programme for children, from the days of our collective cultural history, when children’s entertainment meant more than talking animals and the latest corporate cash-in. When television companies were contractually obligated to make shows for kids. Being obligated in this way, those production companies decided to make the best of it by making programmes that kids actually wanted to watch and that advertisers would pay to reach. I had vague memories of Tony Robinson on TV, a gesticulating wildly as he told a great, swashbuckling adventure. These, I later found, were Jackanory specials edited together for repeat showings early on Sunday mornings, possibly to capitalise on the success of Fat Tulip’s Garden.

So back in those days of yore, when I were a lad browsing the audiobook shelf of the school library, Robinson and those Jackanory specials were in the back of my mind I when I picked up the Odysseus audiobook , with its gaudy, colourful cover depicting the eponymous hero, General Agamemnon and Menelaus. (Nowadays, I’d see the names ‘Robinson’ and ‘Curtis’ on the cover and be heading over to the library’s check-out desk before you can say “shush!”) I found out later that yes, those Jackanory instalments were Robinson acquainting viewers with either this story, its sequel (Odysseus: The Journey Through Hell) or another story in the Greek myth vein, Theseus and the Minotaur.