Recent Reading: The Lightning Thief

I read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan partly because I knew a movie of the book was being made and I wanted to check how solid the mythology was. I like Harry Potter, but the distortions of Latin get on my nerves. Rowling clearly knows enough Latin to get it almost right. Imagine my joy, then, when I discovered an exclamation in Homeric Greek in The Lightning Thief! The first book of the Percy Jackson series reminded me a bit of John Christopher's initial offering in the The White Mountains trilogy due to a careful balance of a full story within a projected series.

The Latin and Greek in the book is grammatical and colloquial. The book follows the standard literary convention that only obscenities remain untranslated, although I doubt the intended audience would realize quite how offensive the phrase 'eis korakas' truly is in Ancient Greek. Riordan extends his untranslated expletives beyond the vocative (the lazy man's foreign language) and even includes the plural imperative of a deponent verb. For those of you who lack the ars grammatica, that means he used a verb form which is passive in form, but active in meaning; that's a level of detail which many grade school Latin students would miss.

The reason for the movement of the world of Greek mythology to the United States is well presented, even if it does show the usual bias towards New York. Riordan has solved creatively the problem of a limited (and previously killed) roster of Classical monsters. The monsters themselves are true to the traditional mythology, and dwell in the appropriately iconic cities and regions. The choice of the entrance to the Underworld is a little surprising, although there is a certain logic to it.

The trio of heroes (an apt term for this subcreated world) fill the Harry Potter mode of main character, best friend, and opposite gender friend/potential love interest, but the character interaction placed between the desperate attempts to avoid assassination (this is a children's fantasy, after all) rings true and explores a lesser known dynamic between two gods, or rather their children. The Lightning Thief compromises as little as possible the occasionally sordid interactions between the Olympian gods - this is a relief from the bowdlerization of many other tales.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I can endorse it as a Classics major and occasional fantasy fan.