C E Chilton

Back to Ithaca C E Chilton

Thomas Moody wants to change his life; or maybe his life wants to change him. He's not entirely sure. He's spent his adult years becoming successful and ensuring that every aspect of his existence is firmly under his control. But now, as Britain emerges from the Thatcher era, he's starting to see things differently, and maybe the world is not quite as simple as he always thought. Encouraged by his new wife Tina he starts work Small Fish, on a new play about Pinochet's Chile which he hopes will change everything about him, and in some small way perhaps, the world he lives in. But when he enlists his estranged brother Michael to the cause, he gets more than he expected. What begins as an attempt to build bridges becomes an uncomfortable and ultimately tragic experience that tears his life apart. In the aftermath, Thomas heads off to Dublin to meet up with Grohnberg, a veteran journalist who provided the source material for Small Fish twenty years earlier. Grohnberg is also a James Joyce aficionado and invites Thomas to join him on a cultural tour of the city in the throes of an anti-British demonstration. Throughout the course of a chaotic twenty four hours Thomas tries to make some sense of his broken life. Back to Ithaca traces Thomas's personal odyssey - his quest for an updated self that he hopes lies within him. Set by turns in the tranquility of Umbria, the frenetic urgency of London and a darkly dissenting Dublin, Back to Ithaca is a deeply moving and very funny exploration of the spaces between reality and delusion, private thought and public deed, and the question of how we make our world a better place.