Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
by Rick Riordan
384pp, Puffin, £12.99
Perseus is alive and kicking and living in Manhattan. He goes by the name of Percy Jackson, he's 12 years old and has been shunted from one special school to another. He suffers from attention-deficit disorder and severe dyslexia. Does this sound like the stuff of Greek legend? Rick Riordan's book Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief unleashes the extraordinary lurking beyond the mundane.
Percy prefaces his tale with a warning to all "half-bloods" like him who might be reading the book: "Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways." The story begins with Percy believing that he has an over-vivid imagination. Surely this is why he sees his maths teacher turn into a beast with claws, bat wings and fangs, and then attack him. A pen thrown to him by his Latin teacher turns into a sword, and he swipes the thing into nothingness. Then he goes home for summer vacation and heads to Long Island with his mum. When his best friend from school, Grover, shows up with shaggy hindquarters and hooves, urging them to flee from a man with a bull's head who manages to evaporate his mother, Percy can no longer sustain the illusion that he is even remotely normal.
He and Grover take sanctuary in a summer camp at Half Blood Hill. This is a training ground for those who are half mortal and half god, for a half-blood has one divine parent. The identity of Percy's absent father is soon revealed to be Poseidon, brother of Zeus and Hades. A war is brewing between these three brothers. Someone has stolen Zeus's thunderbolt and he is blaming Poseidon, who in turn suspects Hades of the crime. If Percy can succeed in crossing the US to the entrance to the Underworld and retrieve the missing thunderbolt to return to Zeus before the summer solstice in just over a week's time, then a major breakout of hostilities encompassing the entire globe will be averted.
Accompanied by his satyr friend, Grover, and Annabeth, a half-blood daughter of Athene, goddess of wisdom, Percy fights and journeys his way across modern America, where the challenges include his mythological namesake's original quarry, the gorgon Medusa, with her petrifying gaze and hair of snakes. He makes an enemy of the war god Ares, a leather-bound biker with shades and fire in his eyes, and discovers that a more ancient and darker force, defeated by Zeus before the onset of the Golden Age, is stirring up trouble and attempting to make an appalling return to dominance.
This is a fast-paced, entertaining read with lots of imaginative moments and a quirky take on classical Greek mythology. Even if you don't know what a fury or a chimera is, you get the idea when you meet them. Riordan gleefully interprets ancient myth in the modern idiom and this makes for great fun for the reader, even if there are glaring inconsistencies. The original Perseus, for example, was not the son of Poseidon but of Zeus. It is also hard not to be reminded of the Harry Potter books. There is an ever-present whiff of a formula being applied and of marketing at play throughout the genuinely lively storytelling.
Also there are grand statements about the second world war really being an epic battle between Poseidon and Zeus and a reference to Hades' resemblance to "pictures I'd seen of Adolf Hitler, or Napoleon, or the terrorist leaders who direct suicide bombers". These weighty contemporary and historical references sit uneasily in what is in effect a light-hearted jape. There is an intended irony in the joke that the entrance to the Underworld is in a Los Angeles recording studio. The unintended irony is that this racy adventure story really does give Greek mythology the Hollywood treatment.
· Diane Samuels is Pearson Creative Research Fellow at the British Library, researching magic