Volume 20, Number 15 · October 4, 1973
Epic Overreach
By D.S. Carne-Ross
Jason and Medeia
by John Gardner
Knopf, 354 pp., $7.95
A verse epic in twenty-four books complete with a council in heaven and a catalogue of heroes, the cast featuring a blind seer, Harpies and Sirens, an enchanted ship, and fire-breathing bulls. A mythological quest poem (the quest of the Golden Fleece) and a romantic tragedy rolled into one. Jason and Medeia, John Gardner's latest work, attempts nothing less. If the thing is to be more than an archaeological exercise, the claim must be, as Time's reviewer put it, that this is 'not just…a tour de force but…an act of profoundly contemporary writing.' Somehow, Mr. Gardner must have made his old argument new.
Review, 2578 words
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