The Bookshop of Unfinished Journeys

The classics have not become irrelevant. We have simply become very efficient at making them harmless.

Martin enters an old bookshop to get out of the rain. Inside, a copy of The Odyssey is losing its depth, stories are being reduced to tidy approved meanings, and an irritable bookseller called Mr Vale appears to know far more about the problem than he is prepared to admit.

What follows is a journey through the stories we thought we already understood. Odysseus, Narcissus, Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein, Scrooge and others become living encounters rather than lessons on a classroom wall. The question is no longer simply what the classics mean. It is what happens when we make them mean only one thing.