The stories probe the ambiguities of the Homeric poem in a haphazard manner, with mixed results. The first is excellent: Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find Penelope married to another man, but suddenly realises — or convinces himself — that this is "a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god...Odysseus turns and flees the tormenting shadows". Elsewhere, Homeric themes are penetratingly rearranged: Penelope, the one safe female in The Odyssey, becomes a cannibalistic demon with her suitors as her trapped prey. Troy, the city of doom, becomes, literally, a citadel of the dead. 

Michiko Kakutani, championing the book in the New York Times, called it "ingeniously Borgesian", and indeed Mason seems to have used Ficciones almost as much as The Odyssey. Labyrinths, books that contain all possible knowledge and men being dreamt up by other men are all important themes here. Mason also has some good moments of originality in this vein: the siren's song as a divine code to the universe; The Iliad as the ornamented manual for an archaic chess prototype. In one story, all of the perils Odysseus encounters are being composed for him in the vengeful dream of the blinded Cyclops. Mason also explores the provocative coincidence of Odysseus's creation: a master-storyteller and a master of disguise, invented by an author we know nothing about. In one of the best stories, a cowardly Odysseus deserts from Troy, travels around as an anonymous bard, composes The Iliad and The Odyssey, and then returns to Ithaca to find his phoney reputation preceding him. 

But elsewhere the craft is nowhere near subtle enough to be compared to Borges. The reader has seen it coming when Odysseus, rummaging around somewhere, comes across a copy of The Iliad; and he can only let out a long sigh as another story begins: "The rigging creaks and the bow wave hisses as Homer lies in his hammock..." The tale of Theseus and the Minotaur appears because of the labyrinth theme, but Mason has created no labyrinth to join the separate myths — he just shoehorns one into the other. Over the page is a meritless story about "Mr O", a patient being treated by Homeric scholars in an allegorical sanatorium. But there is no philosophical element in the book to make this kind of time-travel interesting, and the conceit about the papyrus starts to ring hollow — is it to be taken as an Odyssean ruse, a lie for the sake of a lie, or is it just another example of the school-play humour evident in lines like "we could barely fit another tripod aboard" and "many amphorae lolled on the ground"? In the end, The Lost Books of The Odyssey doesn't amount to much more than a series of experiments conducted in the interstices of a great poem. Some are thought-provoking, some are clownish. Few are very well executed.