This volume is offered as ‘a critical and literary introduction to Homer, not a scholarly one’; its purpose is to fill a perceived gap in Homeric studies, for ‘few attempt to grapple with the inexplicable surplus pleasure we gain from reading the poems’ (p. ix). This assertion is questionable, but it does frame clearly the criterion by which the book is to be judged, namely, its ability to offer a compelling entrée into a foundational work of Western literature.

A preface establishes methodological points of reference. Marx, New Critical formalism, deconstruction, Who Killed Homer? and the oral tradition are name-checked in the process of identifying the locus of the analysis here at the level of wordplay (Lacan also emerges as a significant touchstone, e.g. pp. 29 and 52). Humour, and generally the ways in which ‘characters lose control of the language’ (p. xi), are to reveal tensions between the epics and the culture that produced them. A further introductory chapter suggests that the key to characterisation in the Iliad is the manner in which ‘the desires of separate characters infiltrate the desires of others’ (p. 1). In practice, such infiltration is revealed in ambiguities of syntax and word choice; thus, for example, Calchas' reluctance to name the andra responsible for the plague in Book 1 is said to draw attention to the overlapping desires of Agamemnon and Achilles (pp. 19–22).

After more than 30 prefatory pages, the reintroduction proper begins with an account of Achilles' place in his ‘poem of betrayal’ (p. 29). The extent to which the hero's forceful identification with ingenuousness (9.312–13) is in earnest serves as a basis for discussion of the unreliability of epic language. Next, the Doloneia is described as a ‘memorial to betrayal’ (p. 37) that doubles the Embassy to Achilles, which is in turn read as a meditation on the value of human life and the dangers of self-knowledge. The chapter closes with a discussion of two ‘riddles’ of Patroclus' death (p. 47): why Achilles fails to comprehend Thetis' prophecy that the ‘best of the Myrmidons’ would perish while he yet lived (18.8–11), and why three characters are required to kill Patroclus.

The second chapter returns to the issue of humour, and takes Freud's hoary account of jokes and the unconscious as its ‘guide’ (p. 54; S. Halliwell's Greek Laughter [2008] is cited once in passing). The gods are found to be comic because they exist in a state of denial about their own relationships, and even about their own impotence and mortality (sic, p. 62; cf. p. 91). The comic behaviour of Hephaestus demonstrates the importance of laughter for social cohesion, as do the shaming of Thersites and a running joke that is said to follow Menelaus-as-cuckold. Nevertheless, rather than being subversive, this laughter ‘has a conservative effect, policing the boundaries of mass and elite’ (p. 63), though it is later concluded that ‘Homeric comedy comment[s] on the futility of war’ (p. 72).

The reciprocal titles of Chapters 3 and 4 (‘The Politics of Poetry’ and vice versa) invite their consideration as a unit. The former focuses on Achilles' Shield, the outstanding features of which are found to be its absence of a boss, and hence of a centre point, and its circular, and hence whirling, shape, which together create a kind of centrifugal – or is it centripetal? – force, against which is juxtaposed ‘the offer of the single exit of linear narrative’ (p. 83). The conclusion, that the Shield reinforces Achilles' choice to pursue a short life of glory, is not original (M. Edwards, The Iliad: a Commentary vol. 5 [1991], p. 208), though no debt to previous scholarship is acknowledged. The next chapter turns to Patroclus' Funeral Games, which are said to ‘take the form of politics’ (p. 94), another well-established hermeneutic not acknowledged as such (cf. ‘we have tried to show’, p. 159).Footnote ¹ Instead, the analysis proceeds from a pair of lengthy quotations from Carl Schmitt (the troubling context of whose political philosophy is not addressed) and Nietzsche. The aforementioned ‘single exit’ against which the Shield was measured is now likened to the course chosen by Antilochus in the chariot race, and contrasted with Nestor's advice to his son, in order to bring to light ‘a conflict between the tactics of avoidance and of confrontation’ (p. 103). The clash between Menelaus and Antilochus, and the Games generally, it is discovered, embed ‘a theoretical reflection on the nature of gift exchange’ (p. 112).

The titles and subject matter of the following two chapters suggest that they also form a dyad. Chapter 5, ‘Couples’, takes up the subject of love in the Iliad with a series of standard (and again uncredited) observations. Thus Hector's death scene is tinged with eroticism; he and Andromache resemble Odysseus and Penelope; Achilles and Patroclus enjoy something akin to a marriage. Chapter 6, ‘Flirtations’, building on the assertion that ‘the commitment of war shadows the commitment of marriage’ (p. 130), asks of the encounter between Glaucus and Diomedes, ‘how can warriors who have embarked on a battle to the death talk themselves out of death?’ (p. 131). The proposed answer lies in Glaucus' tale of how the institutions of xenia frustrated the attempt to destroy his ancestor Bellerophon.

The last numbered chapter, ‘The Afterlife of Homer’, offers readings of the closing scenes of both Homeric epics. In the Iliad, Priam is said to find in Achilles a substitute son; in the Odyssey, Laertes regains his son; and both scenes derive additional depth from the imagery of katabasis. A discussion of Laertes' orchard issues in the conclusion that the ending of the Odyssey ‘with the contrast between Agamemnon's gifts and Laertes’ selfless care, perhaps also answers the question of what Achilles wanted from Agamemnon in Iliad 9. Not objects, but love …' (p. 150). A lengthy concluding chapter leads from the aforementioned Who Killed Homer?, by way of a kind of pun, into a discussion of the biographical tradition about the death of Homer after his failure to solve a riddle. Four ways of reading that riddle are then adduced as approaches to the riddle of the Iliad: it speaks of desire found to be meaningless, of words understood too late, of the hero's isolation and of his fear of death.

The observations to be found in this volume are occasionally incisive but, largely unmoored as they are to previous scholarship, it is difficult to keep track of what is original here. Further, the book's findings are presented with a kind of breathlessness, evident in a fondness for rhetorical questions and imperatival exhortations, and they too often rely on tendentious, if not outright misleading, statements. Representative examples include assertions that, in the Greek camp, ‘to utter any complaint against the chieftain is to risk death’ (p. 6); that ‘the gods can die’ (p. 59, citing Iliad 5.385–91); that ‘physical chains [were] suffered by Zeus’ (p. 163, referring to 1.399); that it is a ‘fashionable thesis that Homeric language is swift and easy to understand’ (p. 170; cf. p. 29). There remains in addition the question raised by the title: to whom is this book intended as a reintroduction? If avowedly not a scholarly work, it is nevertheless characterised by chewy prose (e.g. ‘Books 9 and 10 of the Iliad stage a disturbing, politicized version of this problematic, one associated with the essence of the political itself’, p. 39), and by the assumption of deep familiarity with the Homeric poems and some familiarity with Homeric Greek. At least the jacket blurb (by L. Pratt of Emory University) is accurate: ‘Buchan does not get mired in scholarly argument or in proofs of his own originality or authority’.