Olympos by Dan Simmons is the second and final book in the Ilium/Olympos duology. I would have liked to have reviewed Ilium as well but it took me so long to finish Olympos that I don’t really remember it well enough to do so, and my disappointment with Olympos may have unfairly coloured my opinion.
There is no doubt that Simmons is intelligent and has spent much time and effort studying a lot of classic literature. In the end, though, this only serves as further fuel to my disappointment at how he decides to conclude the storylines introduced in Ilium.
Allow me to start with Daeman, upon whom Caliban takes revenge after their battle in the Infirmary. Given the brutal way he slaughters Daeman’s mother and places her hair and skull upon the skulls of all the other dead of Paris Crater, the natural assumption is that the two of them are destined for a show-down fight to the death. Alas, no such encounter materialises.
Then we have Odysseus / Noman, whose change of name is brought about by a desire to have some kind of wordplay reveal that is not nearly clever enough to merit such a pointless change. At the start of the book he almost dies. I feel it might have been better if he did, since his only contribution is to convince Sycorax / Circe to Deus ex Machina the end of the story, which she agrees to because she’s in love w/ Odysseus, for some reason.
Then we have Harman, and his story with Ariel, Prospero, and Moira (who looks like a young Savi so that the chapter she is first seen in has a cliffhanger). She also is awoken from her statis [sic] in the most crude and, frankly, stupid way. I stopped reading for a good 2 weeks. For some reason (you might be seeing a pattern here), Prospero and Moira force Harman to walk across a breach in the Atlantic Ocean so that he can find a bunch of blackhole-containing warheads that are pivotal to the end of the book, but in a way completely disconnected to every other existing plotline.
Finally, we also follow Achilles, who is on a quest to revive his love Penthesilea, whom he killed, and then fell in love with after being infected with a love potion from Aphrodite. Maybe this is some reflection on how all love is basically chemicals, so who are we to judge. To me, however, this just felt like another needless addition in Simmons’ attempt not to resolve his existing plots from the first book.
Overall, I would have preferred Ilium was just a standalone title. Sure some unresolved plotlines would have been frustrating, but it’s far more frustrating to read 900+ pages and still have most of them unresolved, and of the ones that are, you wish they never had been.