HOMER'S "ILIAD" AND "ODYSSEY"

A biography

ALBERTO MANGUEL

302pp. Yale University Press. Paperback, 14.99 [pounds sterling] (US $20).

EPIC OF THE EARTH

Reading Homer's "Iliad" in the fight for a dying world

EDITH HALL

296pp. Yale University Press. 18.99 [pounds sterling] (US $30).

MYTHICA

A new history of Homer's world, through the women written out of it

EMILY HAUSER

496pp. Doubleday. 25 [pounds sterling].

Homer is no one. Therefore, he can become anyone and potentially belong to everyone. The brilliant paradox that the most famous author of antiquity probably never existed, and that his celebrated canonical poems mysteriously evolved and rose to prominence over time, has produced a breathtaking world of reception: every era can fashion the figure of Homer anew, and each reader and writer may find in the Iliad and Odyssey material that speaks with uncanny directness to their own human experience. Three recent books return afresh to the recurring relevance of Homeric epic and offer contrasting visions of the poems and their ever-elusive appeal.

Alberto Manguel has revised and expanded his acclaimed "biography" of Homer's poems, published in 2007. This is not just the tale of an imaginary poet (the travelling rhapsode, old and blind, whose birthplace many ancient cities fought to claim), but the life story of the books with which this figure became entwined: a kaleidoscopic account beginning in the eighth century BC and spanning into the Iraq War and its interminable aftermath. We meet Homer in the hands of ancient biographers and philosophers, in the verses of Virgil and Dante, in the culture wars of Byzantium and the libraries of early Islam. The epics are confronted as history and poetry, art and thought, through towering individuals from Friedrich August Wolf, via Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud, to James Joyce, and in the collective public experience of film, war and even mortality itself.

That's a lot of ground to cover in 300 pages, and Manguel shares with his poetic subject a remarkable talent for unified storytelling, combining sweeping panoramas with selective concentration. The style is both dazzling and extremely dense. The focus is mainly on grand male heroes, the glitterati of the literary world, but non-elite figures and alternative perspectives sometimes sneak in to steal the show while our guiding narrator stays tantalizingly distant, his subjectivity always implied, never asserted. Many big-name events are covered (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Reformation, the Battle of the...