WARNING: SPOILERS!

For our TAC92 Classic Books Club, we brought Homer’s Odyssey forward in our reading queue so that we would read it before Christopher Nolan’s film came out.

I walked into the cinema annoyingly over-prepared, like a teacher’s pet, my heart beating out of my chest. I’d already read the The Odyssey and the The Iliad, and lately the fan fiction too — Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles. This spring, for the book club, I also read Stephen Fry’s Troy (his The Iliad) and then his version of  The Odyssey (called Odyssey).

While watching the film, I was riveted to my seat, unable to breathe regularly; I had to stop and take deep breaths every now and then. The film is so action packed that there’s no room to sit back — which, it turned out, is a problem and also the point of Hollywood.

Stephen Fry’s Troy is a bit like The Iliad with annotations. He gives you the backstory of every family, Greek and Trojan (shall I say, Anatolian?), the curses handed down the generations like trauma, and somewhere in there you kind of understand why Agamemnon is such a monster — a man who would put his own daughter on the altar to get his war moving.

Re-reading it, I became convinced that Greek myths are primarily about hubris and greed. Also, I had previously assumed the Trojan War was Achaeans against Trojans, but it’s actually the entire Greek world (west of modern-day Turkey) against the entire Anatolian one. On the Trojan side, Amazons from the Black Sea, Thracians, Cilicians (not those Cilicians, but they may be related), the Dardanians under Aeneas, even Ethiopians join forces against the Greeks. World War Zero. It is not simply Paris’s hormones and Helen’s wish to be free.

After the re-readings, or perhaps with age, I preferred the Iliad over the Odyssey because of all the moral quandaries in it. I kept changing my mind about whose side I was on, whom to like, which god to cheer for. Reading Fry’s Troy, I was furious at Paris, heartbroken for old Priam, almost cried for Hector (the only innocent person in the whole epic), got disgusted by the talented but arrogant Achilles (the Messi of his generation) and found myself cheering for the losers. Us Trojans! The experience of contradicting myself of never being sure who deserves my sympathy is the whole point of these poems.

The Odyssey gave me less of it. Even Fry’s version is more black-and-white than The Iliad. That’s because The Odyssey keeps almost all its moral trouble inside one man: Odysseus the polytropos, the “man of many turns,” the magnificent liar Athena loves precisely because he contrives and lies so well. You admire him and distrust him in the same breath. Which brings me to Nolan.

I need to give him his due first. It’s a coherent, ambitious, beautiful film, a post-war psychological tragedy in which the real monsters are guilt and trauma. His Sirens don’t sing beauty or knowledge; they force Odysseus to hear his own regret, taunting him with the fact that he aches for an innocence he destroyed. His Athena isn’t a goddess at all but his conscience — a young priestess his men murdered when Troy fell, come back to make him realise the cost.

And the ending: the “Sea People” laying waste to the Mediterranean turn out to be the returning Greeks, brutalised into monsters, dragging the whole Bronze Age down with them. The Trojan Horse, that famous flash of genius from Athena is recast as the original sin, the breaking of Zeus’s guest-law (xenia) that shattered human trust. Odysseus as Oppenheimer, the weapon that destroys its maker’s world.

I realised later why that ending hit me. I spend a fair share of my waking life worrying and feeling guilty about things. My Kayserian guilt inherited from my grandmother.

Take the Cyclops, one of the best things in the film. Homer’s Cyclops (Polyphemus) is a brute, and blinding him is brains beating brawn, savage but necessary. Nolan’s Cyclops is a lonely shepherd, tender with his sheep, weeping. Odysseus and his men are the pests who’ve broken into his home. The blinding is ugly and graceless, and the giant is left sobbing in bewilderment rather than roaring like a villain. A continuation of Troy.

This is precisely my complaint. Nolan’s film is morally loud. It hands you the verdict, Hollywood style. In the cave you are the vermin; the giant is the victim; violence dehumanises everyone it touches. Homer would have left you cheering the clever hero and sick at the maiming, all at once.

So what Nolan gave me wasn’t a flawed Odysseus but a legible one. We kept Odysseus the clever — the man with a good idea here and there — and lost Odysseus the polytropos, the one you can never quite pin down.

He’s been neutered too: no affair with Circe (my Circe would be Mine Söğüt, by the way), none with Calypso (definitely not a blonde), and the flirtatious Princess Nausicaa who is omitted altogether.

Calypso has been demoted to a sort of shaman pressing lotus leaves on Odysseus; Circe, who is one of my favourite characters in The Odyssey, is just another stop on the island-hopping tour. Her island is cold, not the dangerous tropical paradise of Homer. She is colder too, like the Hansel and Gretel witch — no temptation, no trickery. Plus she looks like one (sorry Ms Morton).

The slaughter of the suitors Nolan keeps, but turns into a confession Odysseus bleeding out his self-hatred onto a “lost generation” of opportunists who grew up in the moral vacuum he created in Troy. What he drops is what comes next in Homer’s version: the hanging of the twelve housemaids, perhaps the most unbearable passage in the poem, an atrocity Homer leaves unresolved between justice and horror. A guilt tragedy has no room for a crime its hero can’t be forgiven for.

The cut that stung most, though, was a serene scene at the beginning of the poem’s flashback. One of my favourite stretches of Homer’s version is the island (Scheria) where a shipwrecked Odysseus, a stranger, sits down and tells his own story, so that everything we’ve watched becomes a tale narrated by the man himself. Every monster and every enchantress reaches us only on the word of the greatest liar in literature.

Then there’s Penelope. Nolan takes Homer’s character and makes her the one who reads everyone else and administers justice. The Penelope of the poem is a closed book — cunning, patient, testing even her own husband with the riddle of the marriage bed, her mind hidden to the last line. Nolan’s Penelope hides nothing: she looks at the returning king the songs call a hero and sees a hollowed-out olive tree. Her weaving turns out to be a shroud not for old Laertes but for the whole Bronze Age world.

When Odysseus realises that he has become one of the Sea Peoples, she doesn’t seem to care. The man she loved died in Troy; the war veteran in front of her is just another pirate who’s carried the world’s rot into her house, and Ithaca can’t heal while a monster sits on its throne. This, I think, is the answer to what nagged at me about Anne Hathaway as Penelope. I’d found her cold and couldn’t say why. She’s cold because Nolan took the warmest enigma in the poem and turned her into a judge. Homer’s Penelope keeps her counsel; Nolan’s reads out the sentence the whole film has been building toward. And then she softens. Penelope doesn’t only banish her husband, she goes with him. They leave Ithaca to Telemachus to rebuild and sail west together into the setting sun. A couple who’ve watched their world end, leaving the blood-stained crown behind towards an old dream of escape.

As The Economist‘s review aptly said, every adaptation reflects the zeitgeist. In this case, even the “original” survives in a dozen versions. Netflix’s Troy: Fall of a City invented freely, and still its Helen had me switching sides the whole way through; even Agamemnon I had to pity now and then. That series was more faithful to Homer while being less faithful to the poem, adding episodes because the fidelity was to the ambiguity.

Every adaptation mirrors its era, and ours is an age that wants verdicts, black or white. Are you with Elon/Trump/Mamdani/Erdogan or against them? Clear villains, clear heroes. No discomfort of thinking through the difficult choices, no reading of the other side. We got the Odyssey we deserve. In this case, the lost polytropos is our mirror.

I’ve been trying to work out why this simplification bothered me so much, and I think it’s because I fight it at my desk. For the past year I’ve been trying to write my father’s story. I’m not sure if I’ll ever publish it, but I love working on it anyway. Trying to decipher why things happened the way they did, how people turned out the way they turned out to be…

As I research and write, starting from my father’s grandfather, and especially for the beginning of the 20th century, the evidence is thin and often contradicts itself. Do I (can I) find the exact truth, or do I omit or delete? Do I clean up things that are murky?

The temptation is to round everybody off, to pick the kinder version, to resolve the contradictions into a clean past I can hand to my sons. The dilemma was so vivid in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which I watched last month. Did Arcadia ever exist? Can we un-mix the jam and the pudding?

The rule I try to keep is to set out every possibility honestly, even the unflattering ones, and to label the guesses as guesses. Not to seek the absolute truth. What is truth? Perhaps with time, it is just entropy, nothing else.

A real person resists being made legible, and honesty lets them. Nolan’s Sirens torment a man by making him long for a lost, innocent past; I’ve been digging for a lost world myself this year, and I know it doesn’t come back clean. So when Nolan took the most gloriously un-pin-downable man in literature and pinned him down, I winced as a son and a father.

The Odyssey holds three generations in one frame: Laertes the old father, Odysseus the man, Telemachus the son (and even Telegonus, the other, now-forgotten son). Somewhere in this past year I became the middle link: no longer only a son, now the one the story runs through, with the boys downstream. A man who has buried his father doesn’t watch a film about going home to a father and leaving a kingdom to a son from a neutral seat. Maybe some of what I felt as breathlessness was that.

I went in over-prepared and came out confused. Not for the massacres of Troy and Ithaca, but for the screen where I still get to contradict myself. Maybe that’s the one thing The Odyssey has to teach that no film can hold.

Odysseus wants to go home because, unlike the gods — “more dead than anything,” as Miller’s Circe says, “for they are unchanging” — he can and prefers to die. I’ve been thinking about that for a while now, for reasons nearer home. That’s the essay underneath this one.