Homeward to Ithaka

From the flaps of the Morrow first edition: A resounding tale of Bronze Age lust and swagger and bravery. Homeward to Ithaka celebrates the wanderer principle in every man and his search for the ultimate homeland, the ultimate Penelope. Spanning forty-five centuries in the telling, it begins at Columbia University, but quickly transports the reader back to the time of Cuchulainn, the legendary hero of Ulster, and to the events leading to and culminating in the war with Connaught. Surprisingly Ulysses, still homeward from Troy, appears and is soon in the thick of the fray. Reading this truly original work, one is reminded of Tolkien, of T.H. White of Arthurian fame, of John Gardner in his recreations of classical material; for they all share a highly imaginative approach to epic subjects. Otherwise Mr. Wibberley is his own voice, and he clothes it here in rich and evocative language. As he says of his sources, so he also makes us "almost hear the thundering rumble of the charging war chariots, smell the sweat of horses and warriors, see the flash of spear, shield and sword..." From Leonard Wibberley's Foreword to Homeward to Ithaka... "This book, as is usual with my work, went its own way, and that way was by no means the road I had mapped out for it. I had intended to take the mass of material surrounding the Ulster hero Cuchulainn and those associated with him and weave it all into a historical novel. It is marvelous rich material... It is hard not to be stirred by such material as is contained in The Cattle Raid of Cooley - one of the principal tales concerning Cuchulainn - and I think it was Matthew Arnold who pointed out with some excitement that the Irish myths were almost as rich as those of ancient Greece. "I decided to start the story in New York, with a professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia transported back to Cuchulain's time. But I had hardly commenced when the enchantress Circe walked in, and then Ulysses himself. So the story of Cuchulainn got mixed with the struggle of Ulysses to return to Penelope and Ithaka, and with the need of the professor to find his own true home also. The material, in short, took over from me and gave the direction and the detail to the book. My part was to endure a powerful hallucination until it was all over...