Emotional Scenes In The Edyssey: The Odyssey And The Odyssey

In both the Odyssey and The Amber Spyglass the dead and the living cannot touch each other. Odysseus tried to embrace his mother in an emotional scene after finding out that she had died:
Mother, why will you not wait for me, when I am trying to hold you, so that even in Hades ' with our arms embracing we can both take the satisfaction of dismal mourning? Or are you nothing but an image that proud Persephone sent my way, to make me grieve all the more for sorrow?
There is the same sad scene within Pullman’s book. Lyra goes to the underworld to apologise to her friend Roger as she felt it was her fault that he had died. When they finally meet he rushed to embrace her. But he passed like cold smoke through her arms, and though she felt his little hand clutch at her heart, it had no strength to hold on. They could never truly touch again.

By doing this emotional scene, Pullman is alluding to the Odyssey. This proves that he was influenced by the epic when writing his own novel.
It is clear by looking into Young Adult fiction, such as The Hunger Games and His Dark Materials, that authors have been influenced greatly by ancient materials. Myths were once an oral tradition that were then written down by authors such as Homer, so that they can now be remembered and used within literature. Whether it is that a whole series can be based off a myth, like The Hunger Games, or whether it is just a scene, like the land of the dead in the Amber Spyglass, it is clear that through myth ancient materials have influenced Young Adult fiction a great