Nimble-witted wanderer

It was a certain unforgettable ex-girlfriend, Harry Mount confesses — named only as ‘S’ in his dedication — who came up with the idea for this new book, which he has therefore written to honour her, or in the hope of winning her back, or possibly, in some obscure way, to annoy her. Whichever it is, S must surely share some blame for its misleading subtitle.

You can’t follow in the ‘footsteps’ of mythology’s greatest sailor. As Homer repeatedly says in the Odyssey, ‘No one travels on foot to Ithaca.’ OK, this is pedantic, but the author doesn’t really follow in Odysseus’s wake either. If that’s the book you want, try Tim Severin, or, better, Beaty Rubens and Oliver Taplin.

It’s true that, over several years, Mount swings by and box-ticks many spots fancifully associated with Odysseus’s decade-long journey from Troy to his Ithacan home: Gibraltar, which some identify as the land of the dead; the Messina straits, where Scylla may have lurked and Charybdis squatted; and so on. Yet he also visits places such as Delphi and Marathon, which have no Odyssean connection.

He doesn’t seem all that interested in the Odyssey or in the extraordinary (superhuman yet fundamentally down-to-earth) character of Odysseus, whom he refers to scathingly as a ‘love-rat’ (which is, I think, missing the point). What Mount is interested in is history and humour, and it’s in these areas that he repeatedly knocks the ball out of the park.

There aren’t many books that make you laugh on the very first page, but this is one of them. The author contrasts the start of Odysseus’s journey, on the far Aegean beaches, beneath the smouldering wreck of Troy, with his own embarkation point: the Pret A Manger at Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5.