Enchanted Islands by Laura Coffey

 

 Enchanted Islands by Laura Coffey

When I first heard about Laura Coffey’s Enchanted Islands, I admit that I jumped to a premature and obviously erroneous conclusion about the book. What I was expecting was a somewhat academic endeavour by a classicist and Homeric scholar to combine literary references with geography in an attempt to pinpoint the locations of the various places visited by Odysseus on his ten year journey home from Troy to Ithaca. I had the privilege of meeting Laura Coffey and listening to her as she presented her book at the 2025 Summer School in Homer hosted by University College London. She gave an impassioned, entertaining and fiery talk about her new book, but the work that she was speaking about was nothing like what I expected. It turns out that Laura Coffey is not an academic, a classicist or a Homeric scholar. She is a travel writer and she pens for The Guardian, BBC Travel and Condé Nast Traveller. Enchanted Islands is her first book.

For centuries people have tried to map the myth of the Odyssey and to find the links between real and imaginary places. Scholars have sought to identify the setting of the Odyssey, the location of Ithaca and to determine which islands or places in the Mediterranean and the Aegean best correlated to the islands or places described in Homer’s work. Homeric translator and classicist Emily Wilson says, “There is some correspondence between the world of Homer and the real world, although the relationship is partial and inexact.” That lack of exactitude has not kept countless generations of classicists and geographers from attempting to nail down Homer’s narrative locations. Their collective results have fallen anywhere along the spectrum ranging from certainty to speculation, from proven fact to sheer whimsy.

Laura Coffey says in her book, “But I am no scholar of ancient Greece, I’ve offered simplistic interpretations of the myth as a lay reader, pulling selections out of sequence from the story, to better relate them to the islands I was in. These are not chronologically ordered, nor does this book attempt to be a fully comprehensive retelling of The Odyssey or a survey of all the geographical theories associated with it, some of the ones I’ve included are deliberately lesser-known.” You can readily see where I was off the track about my expectations for Enchanted Islands.

The homeward journey of Odysseus and the various locations that he touched do provide the framework and the backdrop for Laura Coffey’s story. But her book is principally the story of a young woman caught up in the COVID pandemic of London, embarking on what was supposed to be a simple holiday to escape from the broken heart of a failed romance and to gain some respite from her father’s illness. Unlike the hero Odysseus who travelled to return home, Laura Coffey’s journey was one fashioned around escaping from home. Her fascination with the Greek myth of Homer’s Odyssey turned her simple vacation into a six month voyage centered on discovering the reality of the locations described in the bard’s epic. She chased the mythical hero around the various kingdoms of the sea and in doing so, indeed did find places where the myth and the reality coincided. In her travels, she found interesting people, places to enjoy and the restorative effects of travel and nature. She looked for and discovered happiness in this marriage of myth with reality, but all the time was being drawn back home by the worsening illness and the impending death of her father.

Her attempts to locate the land of the sun god Helios or the homes of the nymph Calypso or the sorceress Circe or the Cyclops Polyphemus or any of the other islands or ports mentioned in the Odyssey, all seem secondary to what she describes as her travels through myth and magic, love and loss. Enchanted Islands is the personal reflection and the memoir of an entertaining travel writer and a good read, but it is not the scholarly work that I supposed it to be, nor was it ever intended to be so.