Is Odysseus a hero? By the ancient Greek measure, yes, he is celebrated for cunning, endurance and survival rather than for goodness. By almost any modern definition, he is far harder to defend: a liar and trickster who loses every man who follows him. That tension is the whole point of the poem and the reason we, and half the readers who come through Chapters Bookstore, are still arguing about him three thousand years later.

There are heroes you can explain to a child in one sentence. They are brave, they are good, they save the day and they go home. Odysseus is not that sort of hero. He lies for sport. He sails away from a wife who waits twenty years for him. And of the crew who follow him out of Troy, not one makes it home alive.

Yet we have been calling him a hero for three thousand years.

Now Christopher Nolan has put Matt Damon's weathered face on him and sent The Odyssey back into cinemas on the biggest screens ever built 70mm IMAX, a reported quarter of a billion dollars, ships the size of buildings. The reviews call it thrilling and a little overstuffed, and they are right on both counts but strip away the spectacle and you are left with the same awkward question the poem has always dared us to ask.

Is this man a hero at all? Or have we simply been told he is for so long that we stopped checking?

How many of Odysseus's men make it home?

Odysseus leaves Troy with twelve ships and comes home with none, and alone. A conventional hero protects the people who follow him Odysseus outlives every one of them.

Let us be honest about the body count.

Along the way his men are eaten by a Cyclops, drowned by a storm he half-invites, picked off by monsters, and finally destroyed for eating cattle they were warned not to touch. Some of that is bad luck. A great deal of it is Odysseus his curiosity, his pride, his need to tell the Cyclops his real name when silence would have saved them all.

Read the poem looking for a role model and you will come away uneasy. Read it looking for a study of a brilliant, dangerous, deeply human man, and it opens completely that is the trick of

The Odyssey, and it is exactly the trick a good adaptation must decide what to do with the same.

"Tell me about a complicated man"

The most influential modern translation is Emily Wilson's 2017 version the first into English by a woman and it is the one Nolan drew on. It opens by calling Odysseus not a great hero but a "complicated man," and that single word reframes the whole poem.

Not noble. Not glorious. Complicated. Wilson refused to flatter Odysseus, and she refused to look away from the parts of the poem that earlier translators dressed up the violence, the slavery, the cost. Her Odysseus is not a statue. He is a man you might admire and distrust in the same breath.

So, when people ask which edition to read after the film, Wilson's is the one we point them to. It is fast, clear, modern, and it treats you, as the best books do, like a grown-up. And if you would rather the grand, sweeping classic the translation that shaped how a whole generation read the poem Robert Fagles's Odyssey is the other edition we keep reaching for.

Is it a homecoming or a story about a man who cannot come home?

It is both. The Odyssey is the original homecoming story, but it is also about how the journey home changes a man so completely that home no longer quite fits when he arrives.

Nolan calls his film a homecoming, and he has said his whole career has been about men trying to find their way home. Fair enough. But the poem is stranger than that Odysseus spends years on Calypso's island, and years more with the enchantress Circe. He weeps to go home and he lingers. When he finally lands on Ithaca, he does not run to his wife. He disguises himself, tests everyone, and picks the household apart before he reveals who he is. This is a man who has forgotten how to trust the thing he spent twenty years wanting. The poem, wonderfully, refuses to decide for you whether that counts as a homecoming at all.

And what about Penelope?

Penelope is arguably the real strategist of the poem holding a kingdom together for twenty years by weaving and unweaving a shroud to keep a hundred suitors at bay. Read her as Odysseus's equal in cunning, and she is far more than a symbol of the faithful wife.

Is she the patient wife the tradition celebrates, or the sharpest mind in Ithaca, outwaiting a house full of men who want her throne? 

Read her as a symbol and she is a little dull. Read her as the one person who can match Odysseus's tricks and the ending crackles. She tests him as thoroughly as he tests her. Two liars, finally telling each other the truth.

Your reading of Penelope, like your reading of Odysseus, tells on you a little.

Why can't the film help simplifying him?

Adaptations tend to keep the monsters and lose the doubt the moral murk and unreliable narration that make Odysseus so unsettling on the page are the first things to go on screen.

Cinema loves The Odyssey for the same reasons it loves any myth monsters, storms, a hero you can point a camera at. What it struggles with is the ambiguity the sense that our hero is also, frequently, the problem. It is the same trick the screen plays on every difficult classic the way it can turn Wuthering Heights into a doomed love story and hope you don't notice the cruelty underneath. Nolan, to his credit, seems more interested than most in the shadows he keeps the gods mostly offscreen and lets Odysseus carry his own weight, and his own guilt. Whether that survives contact with a two-hour-fifty blockbuster is the debate you can now have on the walk home from the cinema.

What the film can never quite hold is what the page holds effortlessly: that you can thrill to a man and mistrust him at once.

Read it then pick your side

The best thing about this argument is that everyone who reads the poem comes down somewhere different and the shelves are full of writers who have picked their own side.

Pick up a copy of Homer's Odyssey and the argument is yours to settle. If you want Odysseus at his most modern and unsparing, look for Emily Wilson's translation. If you want the enchantress's version of events, Circe by Madeline Miller is luminous and unforgettable. For the war that made him, The Song of Achilles. For the women the epics forgot, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. And for Penelope's own account of the twenty-year wait, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.

Read one and you have a position. Read three and you have an argument. Read them all and you have a very good winter.

If you want a hero who behaves, there are plenty to choose from.

If you want one who argues back who is brave and cruel and clever and unfaithful and grieving and, yes, complicated Odysseus has been waiting three thousand years for you to make up your mind.

Looking to start your own odyssey? 

Explore our Mythology and classic fiction collections at Chapters Bookstore on Parnell Street, Dublin from Homer and the great translations to the retellings that argue with him.