GREEK MYTHS

A NEW RETELLING CHARLOTTE HIGGINS

Jonathan Cape, 318pp, £20 (250)

Greek Myths is the latest addition to the overworked genre of ‘myth reinterpretation’ that reaches back to Robert Graves and further still. Higgins’s innovation is to put the female characters of myth in the author’s seat: eight chapters focus on tales told by eight heroines, with Higgins standing behind them as the silent ninth, a clever parallel with the nine muses she invokes in the beginning. Weaving is the dominant metaphor for storytelling here. Each woman weaves a decorative tapestry that links together fables, episodes and tales, a nod to Ovid’s own finely-spun, kaleidoscopic Metamorphoses.

Sharp insights are made throughout

The warp and weft suits Higgins’s discursive style well: Sara Wheeler in the Spectator liked how she ‘creates the illusion of spontaneity (“And now what?”) and handles suspense brilliantly’, and Claire Allfree in the

Sunday Times commended her for keeping ‘the storytelling largely ticking along while offering the occasional nifty comment on female narrative agency’; but she found ‘the odd lapse into modern vernacular… ugly’. Higgins is dexterous with a wide range of sources, as 30 pages of notes show, but still proves a master of distillation: Harry Mount in the

Catholic Herald praised her as ‘brilliant at the shortcut to the eternal beauties of the Greek myths’. Do we learn anything new? Sharp insights are made throughout. But after a recent glut of retellings, there are signs of Classics fatigue: Allfree

wondered whether ‘we have reached peak Greek myth’ and ‘could do with a bit of breathing space’.

Helen of Troy and Paris by David (detail)