‘ This brutal time in history is not as distant as we might think’
COLM TOIBIN DOES US A GREAT SERVICE WITH THIS ENGAGING AND OFTEN THRILLING NOVEL
THIS BRUTAL TIME IN HISTORY IS NOT AS DISTANT AS WE MIGHT AT FIRST THINK
House of Names By Colm Toibin McClelland & Stewart 272 pp, $29.95
Colm Toibin may well be the most versatile and adventurous novelist alive. A few years ago he wrote The Master, about Henry James, possibly the best novel ever written on the subject of a novelist. He wrote Brooklyn, a romantic immigration story about an Irish Catholic girl making her way in America. He wrote Testament of Mary, in which he imagined the mother of Jesus telling her life story in the first person. He’s proven himself an exceptionally sure- footed storyteller who can effectively bring his art and his thinking to backgrounds as different as 19th century literary London and Palestine during the birth of Christianity.
Now he’s moved onto yet more daunting terrain with House of Names, a novel grounded in stories from ancient Greek mythology. And in that world, Toibin starts at the top, placing his own inventions and retellings into the saga of the warrior king Agamemnon and his violent, vengeful clan. This means Toibin shares the stage with Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, a dramatic trilogy that’s been considered great for millennia.
He comes off well in this company, by following his instincts and his interests. He focuses on family, a subject he’s emphasized before – he began The Master by highlighting one of the siblings of Henry James and ended it by depicting another one. In House of Names he tells only a little about the wars constantly in progress and even less about the numerous gods whose activities are said to obsess earthbound humans. Instead he makes this above all an account of husbands, wives, children and what they do to each other. This is what attracted him to the subject, the idea that the whole world is spellbound by feelings that originate in bedrooms and nurseries.
At the beginning we learn that Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, has decided she hates him. In hopes of winning a war, he wants the winds to blow in a way that will take his ships and soldiers to the battlefield. His oracles advise him that a god will change the winds if he sacrifices his daughter. He believes the oracles, in fact he’s forced to believe them: His soldiers pressure him to make the sacrifice. He allows the ritual killing of his 16- year- old daughter, Iphigenia, beginning the sequence of murders that destroy his family.
His sacrifice seems typical of his brutal time in history but it’s not as distant as we might at first think. Even in the 21st century there are technically sane adults who send their children out in suicide belts, sacrificing them in what many believe is a divine cause. In fact, wars always necessitate some sacrifices, decided on by the older at the cost of the younger.
Clytemnestra has no time for oracles, gods or sacrifices. She’s the ancient Greek equivalent of an atheist: She believes the time of the gods is in the past. “I live alone,” she says, “in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.” If her husband wins a battle she decides he’s just lucky.
She sees the sacrifice of Iphigenia as the work of a selfish, thoughtless man. She decides to kill him. When he comes home in triumph, she draws him a bath and cuts his throat while he’s in it.
She expects to inherit his royal status and begins directing the life of the palace and the soldiers, aided by her lover, the wily Aegisthus. But he’s not quite as loyal as she hopes. He has other women, and some boys too. More than that, he has his own plans for the power that Agamemnon has left behind. Acting in the queen’s name, he pursues his schemes, which involve directing her guards to kidnap members of her family.
The servants being promiscuous gossips, almost everyone knows who killed the king. So the king’s son Orestes and his surviving daughter Electra decide it’s necessary to avenge their father.
Standard versions of the story don’t reveal much about Orestes. He just pops up here and there when the narrative needs him. But Toibin has said, “I like the idea of the blurred figure in the photo, the person at the edge of a story.” So he brings Orestes to centre stage, giving him a backstory of five years and many enthralling pages. Having been kidnapped on the orders of Aegisthus, Orestes escapes into the countryside. To survive he learns both independence and killing. Eventually he arrives back at the palace and, with encouragement from Electra, kills their mother.
Toibin tells his story by deftly shifting the point of view. First we read Clytemnestra’s story in her words, then we experience events from the different perspectives of Orestes and Electra. At the end Clytemnestra’s ghost appears for a coda.
Few of us give much thought to the ancient Greeks and their stories. We encounter them occasionally in a stage play or an opera but we find them easy to neglect. Toibin does us a great service with this engaging and often thrilling novel. He breathes new life and new significance into stories that were invented at the beginning of Western civilization. It seems likely that he’ll inspire a good many readers to look deeper into the intense pleasures of Greek antiquity.