The Odyssey, Two Ways: Ezra Pound’s Gothic Remix vs. Christopher Nolan’s IMAX Blockbuster

We’ve all been there: you want to experience one of the fundamental pillars of Western literature, but you only have three hours to spare. And so yes, maybe the  two best options are a modernist poem translated from a 16th-century Latin cheat-sheet, or Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film 'Odyssey'.

I've just seen Christopher Nolan's movie which is doing the rounds just as I am revisiting Ezra Pound's Cantos. I have just read through Canto 1 for the umpteenth time, with reference material to hand to untangle the narrative, the structure, the complexities. Meantime Christopher Nolan's movie does not disappoint when it comes to time-slicing the narrative, but having a handle on the tale means there are no real challenges to following what's in front of us. 

I think I’d speak for most, that  Nolan's Memento,  Inception, Oppenheimer  timelines, and his recent Rose of Nevada, are tricky. But these pale when reading Pound’s Cantos. And from the start,  Canto I , the poem I am focussing on at the moment, is a translation of a Renaissance Latin text by a guy named Andreas Divus. It  masquerades  as a medieval Viking poem, describing an ancient Greek myth. It is a literary nesting doll that probably needs three university degrees and a map to navigate. And it starts with Book 11 of the Odyssey.

Ironically, Nolan’s treatment is actually the straightforward option here, even though he also starts somewhere down the track of the story’s timeline. He doesn’t include the complete complex Pantheon of interfering Olympian gods, doesn’t for example, include the story of  Princess Nausicaa, but presents a pacy, slick survival movie. Sure, he completely rewrites Homer’s ending so Odysseus and Penelope can sail off into a sunset, but at least nobody has to look up what "In officina Wecheli" means in the footnotes.

The opening 45 minutes were compromised by often mumbled dialogue and yes, of course, the accents - these, apart from the somewhat dry exposition to set the scene, made for a slow start. It took a while for the movie to find its stride.

The visual effects are stunning for sure, but I have to say I felt mildly sorry for poor old Polyphemus / Cyclops. He seemed to be minding his own business with his sheep and was being gate-crashed by this band of ne'er do wells!

Nolan, on the other hand, gives us Matt Damon as a deeply traumatised, frowning war veteran, guarding his men as best he can. He doesn't  try to outwit the Cyclops with the famous 'Noman' ruse. The whole Homeric sequence around the encounter is lost. Damon’s Odysseus skips the banter entirely and just shoots Polyphemus as a quid-pro-quo against Polyphemus’ devouring of several of his men . Because nothing says 'ancient mythic cleverness' like a $250 million production budget and tactical archery.

There is currently a much larger argument going on about whether Nolan has understood Homer at all. Emily Wilson, whose translation apparently influenced Nolan, has been extremely critical of the film's psychological, emotional and ethical depth. [ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man ] Maybe it’s true that Nolan turns  Odysseus into a conventional tortured protagonist and diminishes some of the qualities — cunning, charm, complexity — that make Homer's Odysseus distinctive.  But this, after all, is an epic movie built to entertain and surprise: most folk know what to expect of the standard epic movie format.

So in that format, to find an authentic emotional centre can be tricky. I guess my sympathy for Polyphemus was unexpected, but there is something almost unbearably economical about the scene where the dog Argos recognises Odysseus on his return. Nobody else recognises him. His wife Penelope does not; his son Telemachus does not; the household is full of suitors who certainly don't.  Argos has simply waited all these years, and his purpose is fulfilled. The dog is lying neglected on a heap of dung, old, dirty and covered with ticks. He has been abandoned since his master went away. We are told he has outlived his dog-years in this waiting.  Odysseus sees him but must conceal his identity, so he cannot embrace him or even openly acknowledge him. And then Argos lifts his head. He knows. That tiny act of recognition is all that is needed. Odysseus is finally home, and someone — the creature who has been waiting longest and has nothing to gain from his return — knows him immediately. And so we have that moment: a little movement of Argos’ head, no music required. Argos dies as soon as he has seen his master again.

( So, no Emily Wilson, I do not salute your chattering hardness of spirit: 'My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times.')

So, back to Ezra Pound: If you prefer your classics served up as epic modernist poetry with heavy Anglo-Saxon alliteration and a side of 16th-century publishing history, Pound is your man. But if you want to see a grim, hyper-realistic Matt Damon battle mayhem and  monsters on the largest screen imaginable, stick to Nolan.

Either way, Homer gets a co-screenwriting credit—though his estate probably hasn't seen many New Directions royalty cheques and  isn't seeing as  much as a penny of that billion-dollar box-office return.

 

Dog Days at Blenheim Palace

 

Blenheim Palace has always known how to do scale. The lake, the bridge, the palace - everything is a model  of certainty —  a choreography to make you feel small in a way that’s oddly steadying. After many visits in recent years, I find what I enjoy most isn’t the architecture, the exhibitions – enjoyable as they are  -  or indeed the increasing profile at the palace which reminds visitors of  the life of Winston Churchill. It’s the walking. It is the sense that the estate understands that  people come not just for spectacle but for that recalibration which happens when you move through open space. Even among the crowds in high summer, there seems, as today in scorching heat, to be plenty of space

Blenheim Palace 2025

On several such walks together with my wife, we make sure we visit the Secret Garden. This was created in 1954 by 10th Duke of Marlborough and is designed as a quiet oasis of winding paths, gentle water features and sheltered corners. It has its own character among the many attractions in and around the palace’s 2000 acres. It was initially, a private space for the Duke and his family.

In recent times, the garden had  become  overgrown, but these days  pathways have been reopened, new ponds added and the garden has been  shared with visitors since  2004. More recent restoration has seen the garden flourish into a space for all seasons.

Lately, a new addition has arrived, in the shape of a sculpture of a black dog, a Labrador, with an explanatory sign at its feet.

Winston in the Secret Garden (Click/Tap to enlarge)

And Blenheim has form when it comes to dogs. The International Churchill Society notes that the palace once kept “some eighty servants…on hand to cope with a large dog population,” and that Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, was said to have turned the place into “a kennel.” [ See here - opens in new tab]. It’s an almost comic image — spaniels flowing through the corridors like a living tide. We can imagine that dogs have long shaped the emotional atmosphere here, offering chaos or quiet company.

So what of this incarnation?

The new plaque beside the Black Dog sculpture has the explanation. It talks about depression without drama, without the heavy-handedness that so often clings to public messaging. It simply acknowledges that mood has weight, and that walking through Blenheim’s 2000 acres of shifting light can help redistribute it. If you know the Black Dog, you’ll recognise the tone immediately. If you don’t, it’s a gentle reminder that its arrival is always possible, always human.

(Tap/Click to enlarge and read)

Churchill famously referred to his recurring periods of depression as his "Black Dog." Whether or not he coined the phrase (it was already an established expression), he made it part of the public understanding of his inner struggles. Today the "Black Dog" has become one of the best-known metaphors for depression.

The Black Dog feels right here as a companionable presence in a garden built for quietness. The setting becomes something which acknowledges dark moods without spectacle, a shadow that can sit beside you while the leaves shift overhead. Here the Black Dog can stand, neither feared nor romanticised. Here a dog waits patiently by the path not primarily as  a symbol of depression, but as a guide beyond it. Sometimes the first step towards recovery is simply to take the dog for a walk.

Wildfires: The Story Beneath the Smoke

Each summer the hills seem to rehearse the same old tragedy: a flicker in the heather, a plume of smoke, and suddenly the air is thick with cant. Fire becomes prophecy; every blaze adds to the story we already think we know. Yet the land itself tells a different story — one Matt Ridley traced in last week’s Spectator, and which I summarise here. It is a tale of fuel left to gather, of old practices set aside, of moors that have been neglected, or abused. 

But in the New Statesman the following week, Richard Seymour offers a counter‑argument  that  focuses on, and expands on,  the interference in  planetary systems for short-term gains. Between these two writers — Ridley and Seymour — we have a debate worth exploring, not because balance is a refuge from thought, but because understanding requires that we see the full shape of the problem.

Ridley’s Argument: The Neglected Moor

Ridley’s case is, at heart, a plea for practical stewardship. He argues that Britain’s moorlands have become dangerously flammable.  And the reason is not climate change but because traditional land management has been curtailed. Controlled 'cool burns', once used by farmers and gamekeepers to keep heather short and peat intact, have been restricted or banned. Rewilding schemes have reduced grazing. Bureaucratic caution, he says,  has replaced local knowledge.

The result is fuel: waist‑deep heather, continuous scrub, and peat primed to smoulder for weeks. Fires that might once have crept across the surface now burn down into the moss, releasing vast stores of carbon and overwhelming fire services. Ridley’s lament is not ideological but ecological: if we stop tending the land, the land will burn.

It is a story of human neglect, institutional misjudgment, and the sidelining of rural workers who still know how to read a moor.

Seymour’s Argument: The Pyrocene

Seymour’s account starts not with moorland practice but with planetary physics. The Saumos fire near Bordeaux, he says, generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud: a thunderstorm born of smoke and heat, a self‑propagating engine of fire. For Seymour, this is emblematic of the Pyrocene, an age in which fossil‑fuelled capitalism has altered the Earth’s fire regimes themselves.

Where Ridley sees mismanagement, Seymour sees weather whiplash: wetter winters that encourage lush growth, followed by hotter, drier summers that desiccate vegetation into tinder. Even a small rise in temperature, he argues, dramatically increases the area burned. Fire‑adapted ecosystems — California’s chaparral, Australia’s eucalyptus forests, are now burning beyond their evolutionary limits.

Crucially, Seymour does not deny the importance of management. He writes:

“Efforts to prevent fires rather than manage them tend to leave fuel to accumulate while also changing the biochemical composition and moisture retention of the soil, thus making the fires more extreme.”

But for him, mismanagement is not the cause — it is the accelerant. The underlying fire is climate change.

Holding the Tension

Ridley reminds us that landscapes are not abstractions. They are tended, grazed, burned, cut, and cared for. When that care is withdrawn, whether through policy, ideology, or simple absence, fuel accumulates. Fires worsen. Rural knowledge erodes. This is true, and Seymour does not dispute it.

But Seymour reminds us that landscapes are also systems embedded in larger systems: atmospheric, hydrological, economic. Even well‑managed ecosystems are now experiencing fire behaviour that exceeds historical norms. Wetter winters, hotter summers, invasive grasses, monocultural plantations, depopulated rural interiors: these  all these have impact. This too is true, and Ridley does not fully address it. The tension, then, is not between fact and fiction but between scale and causality.

Ridley’s fire begins in the heather. Seymour’s fire begins in the air. Ridley’s fire is local, preventable, a matter of stewardship. Seymour’s fire is global, systemic, a matter of physics and political economy. Ridley’s fire can be fought with diggers, burns, and boots on the ground. Seymour’s fire requires emissions cuts, land‑use reform, and a reckoning with the Pyrocene.

Toward a More Complete Understanding

A balanced view is not an escape from responsibility; it is a refusal to simplify a complex ecology into a single cause. Wildfires are not merely the result of mismanagement, nor merely the result of climate change. They are the product of interaction: climate dynamics meeting land‑use decisions, atmospheric physics meeting human policy, global heating meeting local neglect.

To understand the story fully, we must listen to both voices — not to choose between them, but to see how they can direct a concensus.

And yet, as I read Seymour’s essay, I find myself pausing at the point where his analysis widens into a sweeping indictment of capitalism. There is truth in what he describes — the fossil‑fuel economy has undeniably had an influence on the conditions in which these fires now burn — but the polemical edge of his argument risks blurring the ecological picture with a moral one.

He claims these fires are an emblem of a single economic system. For a mement, he sees  the complexity of land, weather, soil, and stewardship simplified into rabid ideology.

Between these two columnists lies a space where the debate becomes genuinely illuminating. Wildfires are neither purely the result of mismanagement nor purely the result of global capitalism per se; they are the meeting point of climate physics and human choices, of planetary forces and local neglect.

To understand the story, we need both approaches  — but we also need to keep them clear.

 Postscript

Here are verbatim the words of Martin Van de Weyer in the Spectator, in follow up to these recent articles. They  encapsulate the epitome of  'both approaches'.

Combustible Neglect

I can attest to the changing climate of south-west France that’s blamed for the inferno which devastated 42,000 hectares of the Gironde. Some 120 miles to the east in my patch of the Dordogne, we used to expect rain every afternoon but now enjoy almost unbroken summer sunshine. As in everything, however, there are economic factors.

The afflicted area between Bordeaux and the Atlantic (I learn from Medieval Histories) was marshland grazed by sheep until 1857, when Napoleon III ordered it to be drained and planted with pines – which were tended by resin-tappers until that industry declined in the mid 20th century.

After which, no one cleared the ground vegetation that acts as kindling for pine plantations in dry summers. Meanwhile, declining wine demand led to the combustible neglect of adjacent Gironde vineyards. Just as the concreting of England for housing estates and industrial sheds has increased flood risks that are exacerbated by altered rainfall patterns, so zealots accuse humanity at large of burning the planet when very often what’s really changed is local topography, driven by local profit and loss accounts.

© The Spectator Aug 8th 2026