Colm Tóibín’s blood-thirsty page-turner
Thought the Corleones were bad? Try this blood-soaked page-turner
TóibínFICTION House Of Names Colm Viking €14.99★★★★★
FOLLOWING the publication of his novel Nora Webster, Colm Tóibín was asked at a public interview about his facility for writing female characters. Perhaps it was modesty that made Tóibín demur, but he eventually suggested that if this were so, he was merely in a line of Irish male novelists who wrote skilfully about the lives of women.
Tóibín cited Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, as well as the complex female characters peopling the literature of John McGahern.
Nora Webster easily bore comparison to the works of Moore and McGahern. Not only is it one of the great modern Irish novels, it is one of the great novels of Ireland irrespective of the age.
The eponymous heroine was the latest example of a woman in the fiction of Tóibín in subtle, often reluctant revolt against the role expected of her by society.
Webster, in her quiet, determined way, pushed against the conventions that were supposed to wall in the life of a widow in a small provincial town in the Sixties.
Nora Webster was the creative climax of a series of works by Tóibín in which women were recast beyond their traditional place. Eilis in Brooklyn is the best-known example, but the author most daringly works with this method in The Testament Of Mary, when the mother of God rebels against a life of silent suffering, portraying the disciples as dangerous radicals and Jesus, at times, as little more than a dupe.
In his latest work, House Of Names, Clytemnestra is another woman refusing to rest easily in her allotted role. Long before she becomes the ruthless, scheming murderer of myth, in Tóibín’s telling she disavows old certainties.
‘I live alone in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed,’ she says. In the early pages of the novel, she declares a kind of manifesto, driven to reject the governing faith by desperate grief following the murder of her daughter, Iphigenia.
‘I will make sounds like prayers, but prayers that have no source and no destination, not even a human one, since my daughter is dead and cannot hear.’
In House Of Names, Tóibín re-tells one of the best-known Greek myths. Agamemnon, husband of Clytemnestra, wants to lead his forces to Troy to rescue Helen, his sister-in-law. With the winds blowing against them, Agamemnon is told he must murder Iphigenia to please the gods, and on doing so the wind will change and he will be able to sail for Troy.
Agamemnon tricks Clytemnestra into bringing their daughter to his camp, telling his wife he wants Iphigenia to marry Achilles. Instead, the girl is sacrificed. The wind changes, and Agamemnon sails to battle.
Clytemnestra retreats to her palace, where she takes the prisoner Aegisthus as a lover and between them they plan the murder of Agamemnon on his return. Their plan succeeds, but in some versions of the story, Clytemnestra’s surviving children, Orestes and Electra, conspire before Orestes murders his mother. Tóibín’s story is split into five sections, with Clytemnestra narrating two sections, Electra one and Orestes’ account told in the third person in the remaining two sections. This narrative distinction is interesting, with the women the more compelling and powerful characters and Orestes an uncertain, indecisive figure lacking the ruthlessness and intelligence of his mother and sister. Much the strongest section of the book is the long opening passage narrated by Clytemnestra. In her refusal to live within the structure of the time, she harks to Nora, Eilis and Mary in Tóibín’s earlier fiction. Her ambitions are malevolent but in her motivation she is another female deter-
mined to exercise power rather than be prey to it.
Power is the abiding theme of House Of Names. In Tóibín’s ancient Greece, the gods are losing their hold and in the absence of divine direction, there is a vacuum which many prove desperate to fill.
After the gripping opening section, however, the story struggles to cohere. Orestes has no understanding of power, made clear during a long exile with Leander, who eventually becomes a leader in the mould of Agamemnon and who out-grows Orestes’ wistfulness for earlier days.
Electra is not a compelling character. Like Clytemnestra, she understands the importance of power and knows how to pursue it by playing a role. ‘As Aegisthus still stood and watched me, with all his malevolence on display, I saw that I was in danger unless I agreed to be the frail daughter, the sweet simpleton, the witness who barely remembered all of the evidence that she had heard.’
However, the story struggles to maintain the fierce drive provided in the opening section by the boiling grief of Clytemnestra. The palace intrigues become paler when told through her children, and even as the bodies stack up and the death rate climbs, that earlier, thrilling momentum starts to wane.
A blood-soaked page-turner marks quite the change for Tóibín, and if the story does not quite hang satisfactorily this nonetheless serves as an ambitious, sometimes beautiful imagining of one of the meanest families in literature.