The classicist Richard Bentley famously called Pope’s Iliad ‘a pretty poem … but you must not call it Homer’. Similarly, Imagining Ithaca is charming and intelligent but rarely a book about the Odyssey or ‘the ancient Greek idea of nostos’ (1). Rather, Kathleen Riley is interested in different expressions of nostalgia across various case studies, some of which have a textual link to Homeric epic or classics more broadly. Riley’s frequent use of the adjective ‘Ithacan’ is made to carry far too much weight and becomes ultimately meaningless, except as a synonym for ‘nostalgic’. This is a very good thematic study; it is just not the book its title promises it to be.
Imagining Ithaca covers an array of literary mediums and some interesting choices have been made as to what to include. Obvious modern receptions of the Odyssey (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joyce’s Ulysses, etc.) are not directly discussed but I didn’t particularly miss them. Running to 19 chapters plus introduction and afterword, Riley’s book is expansive and precludes a chapter-by-chapter summary. She approaches one or two texts per chapter, adopting a case-study approach, though she usually enters each at a slant. So in Chapter 11, which looks at Carson McCullers’ ‘Look homeward, Americans’ (1940), she brings in several other voices to elucidate her reading of the core text, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Georgia O’Keefe and Frank Sinatra. The book therefore discusses far more texts than expected. Given this, Riley has done an excellent job of making her work so readable.
Chapter 17, the longest and clearly most personal to its author, is devoted to Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys, though really, most of the chapter provides a biography of Michael’s father, the Spanish poet Luis Portillo, loosely justified by painting Michael as a Telemachean figure. Its central argument is that Luis’ ‘Salamanca was his Ithaca, invaded by Barbarian suitors in the form of Franco’s Falangists, its resilient beauty tenderly preserved … in his exilic verses, the tristia’ (246). But Luis Portillo’s life story has nothing to do with the Odyssey, and the younger Portillo is as far from an epic figure as one can really imagine. Riley’s Odyssean metaphor is poignant, but unconvincing. The metaphors are not even consistent: is Luis Odysseus or Ovid writing exilic poetry?
Riley’s tendency to reframe every nostos or nostalgia story as Odyssean becomes problematic in Chapter 12: ‘Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996)’. In the book, based closely on a true story, a band of mixed-race Indigenous Australian children have been separated from their families and isolated in the brutal conditions of a re-education camp. They escape and undertake a gruelling homecoming. It speaks to the enduring legacy of colonialism and racial injustice in Australia, a dark legacy that Riley outlines in uncompromising detail. Given this, however, it feels inappropriate to present Rabbit-Proof Fence as yet another reframing of the Odyssey without textual evidence. Surviving colonialism isn’t just a discursive retelling of an ancient Western narrative. A real strength of Riley’s book is the diverse range of case studies she has selected, but this one could have been handled more sensitively. Likewise, in Chapter 7, on Tamar Yellin’s short story ‘Return to Zion’ (2006), Riley notes that there is a ‘Jewish tradition of nostos’ (100) but does not reflect upon what this means for her ‘Ithacan’ interpretation of Yellin’s work.
Conversely, the stand-out chapter is Chapter 18, in which Riley explores the poetry of Seamus Heaney, demonstrating how the themes of nostalgia, katabasis and pietas ring out through his work like leitmotifs. Here, Riley is able to set aside Odyssean comparisons except where relevant. Rather, she notes, ‘Heaney’s late poetry … is permeated by the theme of nostalgic descent and expressive of a filial odyssey that has Aeneas rather than Telemachus as its direct paradigm’ (253). Chapters where Riley is able to identify more than a thematic link to Homer are also strong: chapters 1, 3, 6 and 19 do this well.
Each of Riley’s chapters is well presented, though the parts are definitely greater than the whole. There is no connection between individual chapters, and I found the six sections into which Riley breaks up her study to be fairly loose groupings. Riley makes minimalist use of scholarship, preferring to let the texts she is discussing speak for themselves. It works well for the kind of book she has written.
In Imagining Ithaca, Riley responds to her source texts sensitively and intelligently, and guides us through a dazzling number of intertexts. The book will be immensely useful to anyone studying any of the texts Riley has focussed on, or nostalgia more broadly. But because her discursive hook does not properly work to tie each case study together, Odysseus is somewhat lost at sea. That will, unfortunately, limit the book’s usefulness to classicists and classical receptionists.
