Review: Could have been great, but wasn't.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 18, 2014
This book is a cosy romantic fantasy, with a little science thrown in, in the form of genetic engineering. The story largely follows Pericles, who finds a book with instructions to carry out three experiments, although I missed the third, if it were there. The first was to get the GE juices going, and the second was to engineer Pegasus. This is sheer fantasy, but fair fantasy, and Pegasus takes Pericles to meet some ancients, and it is these the title refers to, not some Jurassic Park concept. The story is somewhat existential in nature, and in parts it takes some following, and it may well be that I never really got to grips with it. Thus there is a bank robbery elsewhere, but what is taken varies in the story, or maybe there was more than one such robbery. There is an ill-defined war going on elsewhere as well, but none of this really impacts on the story.For me, there were problems that would be removed by good editing. The first is Lambrakis has adopted (but not always used self-consistently) an idiosyncratic style of punctuation for speech, and at times I was unsure whether text was conversational or not, or if it were, to whom it should be assigned. The scenes also sometimes jump abruptly so that for a while what you read does not make sense. This could be due to the author leaving three spaces in the script to change scenes. A problem with this technique is that ebook compiling programs usually ignore these spaces, and such breaks have to have symbols, such as stars, between the sections.  Worse, English is presumably not Lambrakis' native language, and at times the sentence construction was either awkward or ungrammatical. This is understandable, and in one sense Lambrakis has done very well to write this in English, but unfortunately the text is sometimes quaint at best. One example: "All of his friends were surprised upon listening to Apollo's suggestions astounded". Were the suggestions astonishing or were the friends, or Apollo, astounded? Finally, it was not always clear what was going on. From a structural point of view, the first chapter might be extremely important to the story, or then again, perhaps it is not, depending on how you interpret what goes on later. Perhaps that is intentional, and the existential nature is the intended strong point. On the other hand, Lambrakis has come up with the material that could be used to possibly create a great Greek tragedy, but to do that, he has to address why Pericles got the book, and later on, why Pericles was important, and why he made the decision he did, bearing in mind the consequences, of which it is not clear he knew. For me, while I prefer neither the nature of the story nor the meaning of sentences to be unclear, I can usually tolerate the first, where the reader has to draw conclusions, but not both.