Murder most foul
Colm Tóibín’s latest novel retells a Greek legend freighted with echoes of Irish history.
Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s latest book, a version of one of the most prominent Greek legends linked with the Trojan War, is based partly on Euripides’ play about Clytemnestra, wife of King Agamemnon of Mycenae. It begins with her voice recounting precisely how and why she murdered her husband when he returned in triumph after nine years. Before sailing to attack Troy, he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia, ostensibly so that the goddess Artemis would send a favourable wind. But in Tóibín’s determinedly anti-heroic retelling, Clytemnestra knows that he killed her to appear strong to his credulous mob of soldiers.
This opening sequence ends with their 17-year-old son Orestes being secretly spirited away by Clytemnestra’s dangerous lover and co-conspirator, Aegisthus. It is all the more powerful for the steely control of her horrific story.
The following section imagines what happens to Orestes over the next few years. With his older friend and lover,
Leander, and the gravely ill Mitros, he escapes an abusive captivity that has much in common with the worst Irish Catholic boarding schools.
Surviving the hard journey through country devastated by civil war – as Ireland was once and as so many others are now – they find refuge with an old peasant woman (another unmistakable echo of Ireland’s past), until the time comes to return.
Throughout, Orestes seems unformed and naive, looking to others to lead him – which will turn out to have appalling consequences. But there’s a problem with this long third-person segment: it’s so full of deadly but somewhat Boy’s Own dangers to overcome (though it has its own moving tenderness) that the story’s power and drive are diminished.
When the second sister, Electra, begins to speak for herself, the power surges back. She knows what her mother has done and condemns her for it, but she fears Aegisthus’s cunning and control. She is a heart-wrenching figure, dreaming vainly of a strong husband to take her side, waiting in the shadows for her brother to reappear and avenge his father’s death. There will be many more deaths and finally a hard birth. In the end, there is only watchful, uneasy silence.
Unlike The Testament of Mary, this book is not entirely successful; yet at his best, Tóibín expertly deploys those apparently simple, tightly restrained sentences – with their complex freighting of tension and emotion – that make him such a masterly writer.
HOUSE OF NAMES, by Colm Tóibín (Pan Macmillan Australia, $35)