This volume adds to the spate of recent studies of Graeco-Roman narratives of katabasis, but does so from a reception-oriented perspective. Judith Fletcher provides an up-to-date, stylishly written and well-informed analysis of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century works that explicitly draw on tales about ancient stories of a heroic descent to the underworld, in genres ranging from novels aimed at adults, to comic books that targetall ages to literature written expressly for children. Writers discussed at length include John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman and Coraline), A.S. Byatt (Angels and Insects), Elena Ferrante (several novels about the ‘descent’ of girls or dolls, including The Lost Daughter), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) and Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet).

Chapter 1 reviews ancient source texts for underworld stories from the Odyssey onwards, incorporating the descents of, especially, Odysseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Orpheus and Persephone. Chapter 2 examines works by Barth and Gaiman, showing how they exemplify one version of what it is to be postmodern, in so far as, through a process of fragmentation and recombination, they simultaneously invoke and ironically undercut their literary predecessors (notably those mentioned in chapter 1), and also blend media traditionally distinguished as ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’. Chapter 3 explores the engendering of the underworld in the feminizing imaginations of Byatt and Ferrante, via consideration of a filmed version of a work by Gaiman. Chapter 4, perhaps the most impressive part of the book, burrows fascinatingly into another sort of subterranean world, that associated with notions of exclusion, deprivation and displacement: prominent are the contrastingly powerful voices of Morrison and Rushdie, alongside Ann Patchett’s Orpheus-inspired novel State of Wonder. Abrief epilogue suggests generalizations to pull the preceding material together, emphasizing, for example, the ‘layered recursivity’ (202) typically exhibited by the works discussed, and the recurrent motifs of the dream and the double that underworld spaces evoke.

So far, so apparently straightforward; but the book’s structure isn’t quite what it seems. Departing from its ostensible role of tour guide to the ancient sources, chapter 1 makes frequent sorties into postclassical territory, giving us, for instance, half a page on Tolkien’s echoes of the Aeneid in The Hobbit (34–35), followed a few pages later by a substantial digression about modern reimaginings of Persephone’s rape in Hardy, Lawrence, Atwood and modern fantasy literature (43–44). Similar expository toing-and-froing characterizes the later chapters, a practice that can sometimes be confusing. The main account of Gaiman’s Sandman is at 64–85, but is already a partial anticipation at 47–52, not to mention a briefer discussion as early as 32 in the middle of the chapter about sources. Such anticipations, which pervade the book, assume that the reader already possesses sophisticated knowledge about the postmodern authors in question. (This sort of implied erudition does not, however, apply to classical antiquity. Fletcher informs us, for instance, that the Odyssey narrates the story of Odysseus’ homecoming from Troy (16), that Maecenas was a wealthy patron of the arts at Rome (30) and that Ovid’s Metamorphoses was an epic poem about mythical transformations (36).)

To check (in view of Fletcher’s sometimes staccato manner of structural exposition) that one has found all the relevant information about a given author or work, one needs to consult the index. But the index is a weird and wonderful underworld in its own right, frequently challenging the reader to explain why some things merit inclusion (‘Bryn Mawr College’, where Byatt spent a year; ‘Howard University’, where Morrison was educated; ‘Minnesota’, where a character in a novel comes from), but others do not (katabasis is absent; catabasis has just one reference, to a footnote; modern scholars are present or absent without evident logic). Perhaps the two most revealing entries are ‘Booker Prize’ and ‘Nobel Prize’, for Fletcher loves to highlight the public accolades won by her authors: ‘multi-award winning American poet’ (90); ‘Booker prize winning’ (93); ‘multiple award-winning children’s novella’ (114); ‘“Best of the Booker” winner’ (150); ‘Nobel laureate’ (150); ‘Pulitzer Prize winning novel’ (202; strangely, the Pulitzer doesn’t make it to the index). Might this insistence imply a lurking concern (unfounded, at least in most cases) that the works in question do not cut the aesthetic mustard, and so need bolstering with their prize-winning status?

This book has a lot to recommend it, though it would have benefited from revision to remove awkwardnesses in the exposition. The treatment of the ancient underworld is, on the whole, solid rather than innovative, but the account of the later literary reworkings succeeds in conveying a real sense of how and why some postmodernist literary productions mean what they mean. For that, Fletcher deserves much credit.