It’s the way you tell ’em

From George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to Imre Kertész and Haruki Murakami, novelists have long been in awe of Greek tragedies and have shaped their narratives along lines inspired by the plays. But actually retelling the story enacted in ancient tragedy, by presenting the myths of the theatre scripts as historical fictions set in archaic Greece, is much a more recent phenomenon.

The trend began in the 1980s, coinciding with the gradual reappearance of Greek tragedy in the repertoire of mainstream professional theatres, and accelerated over the last two decades, since Christa Wolf ’s influential novel Medea (1996). Her rewriting of Euripides’ evergreen tragedy by the same name tackled, in the voices of Medea and other characters in Bronze Age Corinth, the history of Wolf ’s tense relationship with the Communist Party in East Germany. By giving voice to multiple witnesses on the action, the novel showed how the particular version of the myth staged by Euripides, in which Medea – notoriously – murders her own young sons, might have arisen from rumours maliciously spread to frame her, a perceived “enemy of the people”, by cynical spin-doctors.

Until recently, the most successful English-language novel recasting a Greek tragedy was Barry Unsworth’s dazzling Songs of the Kings (2002), which skilfully retold the terrible story of the human sacrifice of a princess in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, implying that myths may have been doctored in antiquity by bards and royal propagandists. But now Colm Tóibín, a giant amongst storytellers, has thrown down the gauntlet with his latest novel, Like Unsworth’s, it is based on the myth of the house of Atreus, but this time it uses the version told in Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia. And it is a masterpiece.

It seems in hindsight inevitable that Tóibín would one day rewrite a Greek tragedy. It is a genre obsessed with intergenerational strife, and from Tóibín’s pen we have become

House of Names.

accustomed to rites-of-passage novels about young adults asserting their independence while acknowledging their ancestral roots, such as Brooklyn (2009). His evocations of familial relationships, especially in bereaved Irish families, as in The Heather Blazing (1992) and Nora Webster (2014), has been searing; as was his dissection of the relationship between female parents and their male offspring under the microscope of his short story collection, Mothers and Sons (2006). He has even set a novel in the ancient Mediterranean, The Testament of Mary (2012), in which Jesus’ mourning mother rails against her plight in a style Tóibín has acknowledged was inspired by the rhetoric of the angriest heroines of Greek tragedy, and especially that of Medea.

The House of Names, then, fuses all these earlier experiments on the fringes of Greek tragedy, and finally moves us wholeheartedly to archaic Greece, the time and place of tragic myth, in a magnificent evocation of a troubled community undergoing two decades of reciprocal atrocity. During that period, we see the maturation of the central character, Orestes, from early childhood: he experiences his sister, Iphigenia, being sacrificed by his father Agamemnon, and eventually responds to his mother Clytemnestra’s retributive killing of Agamemnon by murdering her himself.

Tóibín’s ancient Greece, riven by brutal feuds, owes something to his background in Ireland during the Troubles and his grandfather’s involvement with the IRA. The vendetta-rich Oresteia has already attracted several of his compatriots as an oblique way of addressing the Irish situation: in Tom Murphy’s play The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s television drama In the Border Country (1991), Seamus Heaney’s 1996 collection The Spirit Level, and Marina Carr’s tragedy Ariel (2002). But Tóibín’s ancient Argos is more sinister still.

Children disappear without trace, guards are found murdered in palace corridors, and entire families massacred in local farmhouses. Surreptitious sexual encounters and whispered interchanges take place continuously. Prisoners languish in secret underground cells built into the citadel’s foundations; chaingangs of slaves are suddenly transported from one part of the Peloponnese to another.

Although fleeting alliances are formed to wreak revenge or secure temporary power, nobody can trust anyone else for long, and a raised eyebrow or a downward glance can indicate that an outrage has been perpetrated, as it were, “offstage” – for Tóibín has found fruitful ways to exploit the theatrical nature of the text he is recasting. The metaphor of role-playing underpins much of his psychological portrait-painting. Spies and messengers arrive with grim news from far away. Like the ancient trilogy on which it is based, the action takes place in a small number of identifiable locations – the royal palace, the coastal sanctuary where Iphigenia died, a remote prison camp and the old woman’s farmhouse where Orestes grew up after being kidnapped. The potential hazard of a sprawling time frame is avoided by deft condensation of the story into a handful of key sequences, while carefully insinuated flashbacks remind us that these vengeance killings are rooted in a tradition of fratricide now generations old.

At the heart of the novel, Orestes is in hiding in the farmhouse. With an accidentally acquired “family” consisting of the old woman and two other boys, he is enjoying the nearest approximation to a happy household he will ever experience. In this episode of temporary calm, twin narratives are embedded side-by-side. Both feature swans, and both represent what Tóibín suggests is an affinity between Greek and Irish legend.

The first is the story of Helen of Troy. No proper names are provided, but the identities – imprinted on Irish consciousness forever by Yeats’ exquisite poem “Leda and the Swan” (1923) – are unmistakable: it is the tale of “the most beautiful girl that anyone had ever seen”, the product of the mating between a god disguised as a swan and a mortal woman. She had two doomed brothers (which readers recognise as Castor and Pollux) and a sister (Clytemnestra); her beauty caused the Trojan War, which has left Greece in its current miserable state, bereft of a generation of its men. The second tale, told by Orestes’ sickly friend Mitros, is the old Irish legend of The Children of Lir, in which the wicked stepmother of Lir’s four youngsters turns them into swans. They must undergo 900 years of exile before they can escape her spell.

Where the Greek myth ends in misery, the Irish story holds out the possibility of redemption for the cygnets, albeit in remote

Edith Hall on the craze of turning Greek tragedy into novels – and why Colm Tóibín’s ‘Oresteia’ is a marvel Prisoners languish in secret cells, children disappear without trace