Pullman refined his own storytelling gifts orally, by recounting versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey to his middle-school students. He estimates that he’s told each epic at least thirty times. Indeed, he once caused a scene in a restaurant when he was retelling the Odyssey to his son Tom, then about five years old. “Every time we went out to dinner, I’d tell it to him in serialized form while we waited for our food to come,” he said. “I’d just gotten to the part where Odysseus has come back home in disguise as an old beggar. Penelope has taken Odysseus’s old bow down and told the suitors that she’ll marry whoever can string it. They all try, but none of them can do it. Then Odysseus picks it up, and he feels it all over—to make sure it’s still good, which it is—and then in one move he strings it. Of course, we know what’s going to happen next—he’s going to use it to kill the suitors—but just before that he plucks it just once, to hear the tone. Tom was so taken with the tension of the moment that he bit a piece out of his water glass. The waitress, who was coming toward us with our food, saw him do it, and she was so startled that she dropped her tray. There was food everywhere! It was chaos.”