ITHAKA (12+)
by Adèle Geras
David Fickling Books, £12.99; 416pp
£11.69 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

CHILDREN LOVE THE stories of Homer — the triumphs and the tricks of Odysseus and the account of how he bent his great bow and shot his wife’s suitors. But they want to know more about how the young Telemachus, and Odysseus’s faithful wife, Penelope, survived.

Now Adèle Geras has attempted to answer these questions in Ithaka, the story of the women and children left behind by the Trojan War.

As the exact location of Odysseus’s island was claimed only last month to be part of Cephalonia, the facts behind Homeric legend are more or less up for grabs.

The story of Penelope and her loom, the tapestry she undid every night to postpone her decision about the suitors has a fairytale element that makes it particularly attractive to children: Penelope, too, is a trickster, and one whom you feel sure would have outwitted Rumpelstiltskin.

Geras has imagined how she filled her 20-year wait, half-dreaming of her husband’s adventures and half-weaving them on her loom.

We observe Penelope and Telemachus through the eyes of both her maid, Klymene, and through Ikarios, respectively the granddaughter and grandson of Eurykleia, the servant who first recognises Odysseus when he arrives disguised as a beggar at his own door.

This is the same technique as in Troy, Geras’s Whitbread-shortlisted novel inspired by The Iliad. Its advantage is that we are allowed to see plausible motivations for the stuff of legend. The most successful novel of this kind (which some publisher must, please, reprint) is Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, in which Helen’s life among the Trojans is witnessed, and saved, by her kidnapped Greek son, Nicostratus. Ithaka isn’t in that league, but then it is more experimental than a straightforward children’s novel in that chapters are interspersed with free verse, and Argos’s doggy dreams.

Both Klymene and her brother have the same gift as Cassandra: they can see the gods and even on occasion enjoy their protection, but nobody else believes them.

Life on Ithaca goes from bad to worse. Geras’s descriptions of the squalor and danger of living in a palace where even the poor old dog Argos gets picked on by the brutish suitors, are excellent.

“The dog had stopped whimpering and nuzzled Klymene, licking her hands, and his tail — his poor, skinny, almost furless tail — was starting to wag again. She could see that it was going to be hard for him to stand up. I’ll die, she thought, before I ask any of these vile men to help me.”

Such details, told in direct, unambiguous prose, make for an intelligent, warm-hearted novel about the lives of women and children in Homeric Greece.

I found myself getting cross, however, when Geras has Penelope eventually falling for one of her suitors, the handsome Leodes.

Children, even the kind of sophisticated teenager who will enjoy this book, hate the idea of mothers being unfaithful.

My primary school audience wanted Penelope to shoot her suitors herself, and they would be horrified to hear she might have had sex with one of them instead. I don’t myself believe it. If ever there was a man worth waiting for, it was Odysseus.

What's more . . .

THE ADVENTURES OF ODYSSEUS
by Neil Philip
Orion, second-hand only
Superbly illustrated by Peter Malone. For 7+

THE PIG SCROLLS
by Paul Shipton
Puffin, £4.99
A victim of Circe finds there’ s no bed for bacon. For 9+

THE LUCK OF TROY
by Roger Lancelyn
Green Puffin, second-hand only
Helen’s son helps the Greeks to win. For 9+

BLACK SHIPS BEFORE TROY / THE WANDERINGS OF ODYSSEUS
by Rosemary Sutcliff
Frances Lincoln, £8.99 each
Close to the real thing. For 10+

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