Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley Marina Mackay (bio) IMAGINING ITHACA: NOSTOS AND NOSTALGIA SINCE THE GREAT WAR, by Kathleen Riley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiii + 331 pp. £30.00 cloth. Imagining Ithaca is not primarily a book about literary responses to the Odyssey, and thus it is not much concerned with Ulysses, the subject of a paragraph in the introduction and a few passing mentions thereafter. Rather, Kathleen Riley's declared theme is "the contemplation of Home from a distance" (21), and her book consists of readings of a wide range of films, novels, plays, poems, and memoirs that appeared between 1918 and 2017. Aside from the introduction and epilogue, the book is arranged in six parts, incorporating nineteen numbered chapters. The text's first part is about homecoming in the context of the world wars, and it consists of separate accounts of Great War novels by Rebecca West and Erich Maria Remarque,1 of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives,2 and of David Malouf's historical novel Fly Away Peter.3 The shorter second section addresses three works that incorporate explicitly Odyssean allusions: John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Njabulo S. Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and English writer Tamar Yellin's short story "Return to Zion."4 There follows a section on exile and nostalgia consisting of chapters on memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing and on two Alan Bennett plays. The fourth part is on ideas of spiritual displacement and discusses work by Carson McCullers, Woody Allen, and Doris Pilkington Garimara; the fifth part addresses nostalgia for childhood in works by George Orwell, John Van Druten, and John Logan. The Telemachus figures of the book's final section, "Voyages Round the Father," are Seamus Heaney, Daniel Mendelsohn, and politician-turned-television-presenter Michael Portillo, whose work on the life of his late father Luis Portillo, a poet, center-left intellectual, and Spanish Civil War refugee, is credited early in Riley's acknowledgments as among the inspirations for her book (vii). It would be difficult to make any programmatic argument from so heterogeneous a body of work—so many differences of medium, genre, and form, and of historical, cultural, and national context—and Imagining Ithaca does not attempt one. Rather, Riley's interest is in the sheer pervasiveness of yearning for real or imaginary homes, and if the book has a general orientation, as distinct from a specific argument, it is that nostalgia is more usefully understood as a feature rather than a failing of modern literature, theater, and film. She proposes that, contrary to the new set of pejorative associations that nostalgia has accrued from recent exploitation by right-wing opportunists—promising various impossibilities about the recovery of American greatness or British sovereignty—nostalgia implies no [End Page 549] particular politics. Side by side sit chapters on Speak, Memory and the then-Communist Lessing's Going Home, a reflection on expatriation almost contemporary with Nabokov's.5 Because the chapters are almost entirely self-contained, such juxtapositions go unremarked. The book's chapters range in length from just over four pages, in the case of the one on Yellin, to over thirty deeply researched and absorbing pages centered on the episode of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys that Portillo wrote and presented about a journey from Granada to his father's beloved Salamanca. The book's usual allowance is approximately ten or eleven pages per chapter, and much space is necessarily given to the exposition of plot and situation for the benefit of new or forgetful audiences of each work. The range of material surveyed is compelling in its own way, but the short chapters mean that the local analysis, which is invariably astute and well informed, sometimes feels squeezed by the need to contextualize and summarize the text under consideration. For example, the section titled "John Van Druten's The Widening Circle (1957)" spends much more space on the nineteenth-century transformation of West Hampstead from a literally Keatsian rural idyll into a bourgeois NW6 suburb than on Van Druten's actual book, a volume of autobiography...