The imagery is gorgeous, the music modernist and unforgettable, the ending is mythic.
Petersen's book, particularly in its use of first-person accounts, veers between the real and the mythic, the half-remembered and the exaggerated.
Burnham's mid-life crisis is played as a suburban rejig of The Odyssey; a heroic mythic journey set down amid the strip-malls and side-streets of middle-class USA.
Celebrated in song by the likes of Georges Brassens and Yves Duteil, who both lamented its stern and gloomy walls, as well as a backdrop in countless French gangster movies, La Santé has always had a mythic aura for Parisians.
Their quest has been to find that mythic formula: the pure-blood British film that plays well around the globe.
But then a traditional storyteller tells him the mythic version – a 13th-century tale about the Mande people.
Some of the Grimm tales transparently address our darkest fears, but in a sense, all mythic storytelling is about addressing uncertainties and anxieties.
Hegarty has always been drawn to voices that self-consciously channel female mythic power.
Easter Sunday came and went, and still the mythic number has not risen.
The North Island is Te Ika A Maui, "the fish of Maui" (recounting the mythic tale of New Zealand's creation) where the South is Te Wai Pounamu, "the waters of greenstone" (describing the glassy stone, prized by Maori, that is found in the swift rivers and along the savage misted beaches of the lonely south).
It taps directly into the country's mythic image of itself: unshowily brave and just a little stiff, brewing tea as the bombs fall.The "Keep Calm" slogan being already taken, the Conservative Party had to make do with a Churchillian pastiche of its own devising—"Together in the National Interest"—at its annual conference in Birmingham this week.
