What Book to Read?

The Penelopiad (2005) is another in the Canongate Myth Series, in which well-known writers retell a well-known myth. I’ve already reviewed two of these – Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, by AS Byatt and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. I admire Atwood’s writing, as I do Byatt’s and Pullman’s, and was interested to see what she would make of it.

Atwood has chosen to retell the story of Odysseus from the perspective of his wife Penelope. All that Homer’s version tells us is that during Odysseus’s long absence from Ithaca, his wife Penelope remained faithful to him, and repulsed the advances of numerous suitors who, assuming Odysseus to be dead, sought her hand in marriage. Atwood is also interested in an incident in Homer’s version in which, after the suitors have been dispatched, Telemachus, the son of Penelope and Odysseus, hangs twelve salve girls who are said to have consorted with the suitors. ‘I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids,’ she writes in the Introduction. And in The Penelopiad,’ so is Penelope herself.’

Penelope says she wants to set the record straight. Now that she is in Hades – the land of the dead – she can give her own version of events – ‘do a little story making’. She feels that Odysseus made a fool of her, and that later, there was ‘scandalous gossip’ about her that she now wants to refute. This retelling starts with Penelope’s childhood, then her marriage to Odysseus, then her struggle with the suitors and the return of Odysseus. The story is frequently interrupted by the twelve maids, who form a chanting and singing Chorus, which as in Greek theatre, comments on the action. Their interruptions take a variety of forms, including a rope-jumping rhyme, a lament, a sea shanty, an anthropology lecture and a trial. These commentaries focus, Atwood says, on ‘two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of The Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?’

For me, two main themes emerged from this retelling. The first is feminism. The Penelopiad, in its conception and content, is a feminist creation – telling from a female point of view a story previously told from a male one. Not surprisingly, sexual double standards abound. The story gives a voice (a variety of voices actually) to the previously voiceless maids. But Atwood can’t quite be satisfied with this. She also has to send up academic feminism, suggesting in the anthropology lecture that the death of the maids represents ‘the overthrow of the matrilineal moon-cult by an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father-god-worshiping barbarians’, the chief of whom is Odysseus. At least I think she’s sending it up. Some readers may recognise the reference at the end of the lecture to Claude Levi-Strauss – but I certainly didn’t.

The second theme is the unreliability of narrative. As Atwood points out, Homer’s story of Odysseus is only one version of several similar stories where Penelope’s role is somewhat different – hence her reference to ‘scandalous gossip’. The story Penelope tells here is a bit different to that in Homer – Odysseus doesn’t fool her quite as completely. And Atwood weaves in some of the allegations about Penelope’s conduct that Robert Graves includes in his book The Greek Myths.  Penelope makes it clear that Odysseus is a liar and a trickster, and suggests that some of the stories about his exploits might be much exaggerated. For example, the one-eyed Cyclops that he blinded might have been no more than a one-eyed inn keeper he fell foul of. But there is no reason to believe Penelope either. ‘I’ll spin a thread of my own,’ she says, reminding the reader that weaving by day and undoing it by night was the way she tricked the suitors. ‘The two of us were – by our own admission – proficient and shameless liars of long standing. It’s a wonder either one of us believed a word the other said.’ Quite so. I’m not sure Atwood ever establishes what Penelope was ‘really up to’, either.

The novella was mostly greeted with acclaim, critics praising its ‘wit, rhythm, structure, and story’. A few disagreed, one calling it ‘a piece of deliberate self-indulgence.’ I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but I was a bit underwhelmed by it. I found there was something a bit too clever by half about it. One of the things I really like about Atwood’s writing is her dry humour, but it just doesn’t work for me this time.

You can read more about Margaret Atwood here.

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I have a particular reason for reviewing this book just now, but you’ll have to wait until my next post to find out what it is.

After the death of his wife, art historian Max Morden returns to the Irish seaside village where he had holidayed with his parents as a child. There he reflects on his life, focusing on his wife’s death, but also on the events of the summer when he was caught up in the life of the Grace family who had also taken a house there. Max had a crush first on Mrs Grace, then on her daughter, Chloe. But that summer ended in disaster, and Max finds little peace in his contemplation of either the past or the present.

The decision to award the 2005 Man Booker Prize to The Sea was met with a very mixed reaction. Chair of the judges, John Sutherland, called The Sea ‘a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected’. Other critics praised the writing, one, for example, commenting on its ‘sensuous phrasing, and pungent observation of human frailty’, another on its ‘fastidious wit and exquisite style’ and another on its ‘grace, precision and timing’. But others were less complimentary, one saying that reading it was ‘more like sitting an exam than taking in a tale’, another that it was ‘a crashing disappointment’ – ‘self-indulgent, snooty and pretentious’.

A case can certainly be made against The Sea. It is a short book, in which nothing much happens; many people think a good novel should have rather more of a plot. When the climax of the summer holiday in the past is reached, it comes with almost no preparation, but instead of being shocking, it can be seen as simply silly. Readers are expected to pick up on all kinds of allusions. Max muses on the name of his wife’s doctor, Mr Todd; the reader is supposed without much evidence to recognise the allusion to Sweeney Todd the demon barber. Max pictures himself in a monastery; the reader is supposed to recognise the allusion to the fifteenth century painting of St. Jerome thought to be by Jan van Eyck. And the whole story is an echo of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, with two children, a governess and a fatal outcome. The boy in The Sea is even called Myles, presumably after Miles in James’s story. It is not clear how the reader is supposed to recognise the debt to James, but knowing there is one is important, as the outcome of the summer does make more sense if seen as a reference to The Turn of the Screw. Finally, there is the question of language. What one critic has called ‘Banville’s famously torrid affair with his thesaurus’ results in the use of a number of words that most people haven’t ever heard of, some of which aren’t even in a standard dictionary: for example horrent (bristling), leporine (characteristic of rabbits or hares) and caducous (of short duration, deciduous). Extending the reader is one thing; being pretentious is another.

But of course there is another side to this. The book is short, but seems exactly the right length. The plot is less important than Max’s observations, but preferring plot over style may be a personal preference. The structural transitions from present to recollection are ingeniously achieved. Max is pompous – but brilliantly so. Max the narrator is not Max the boy of the story; he has recreated himself. ‘How difficult it now is to speak as I spoke then,’ he notes. It is quite fitting that this older Max, the art historian (and he’s even changed his name) should deliberately choose to speak in pretentious language. He has in fact almost lost the ability to speak directly. For example, when he asks his grown up daughter whether she still has teddy bears – ‘Your lares familiares . . . I suppose you have them still, propped on your maiden couch’ – he reveals his total inability to relate to her. Only in the shocking cry of rage that his wife’s death has left him ‘with no one to save me from myself’ does the veil of self-protecting language slip aside. For all that he loved his wife, Max reveals himself to be totally self-centred – yet Banville manages to make him a sympathetic character, or at least one that has feelings that readers are likely to recognise in themselves. And there is admirably wry, black humour: after treatment for cancer, his wife’s hair had begun to grow back ‘in a half-hearted fashion, as if it knew it would not be needed for long’.

There is also the question inherent in any work based on recollection of childhood experiences: how are they remembered with such clarity? No doubt some particularly significant events do sear themselves into the adolescent brain, but retelling even these is at best an exercise in creative remembering. How, for example, does Max know, let alone remember, that it is gin in the glass Mr Grace is carrying when he first sees him? But Banville is aware of these traps: Max both is, and is not, alert to the problems of recollecting. Early in the story he notes that ‘henceforth I would have to address things as they are, not as I might imagine them’, but still notes later ‘a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape’. And of course that ‘real’ isn’t real either; as Banville says, ‘The reader believes absolutely in the reality he’s reading about, while at the same time knowing it’s fiction – in other words, very well-wrought, convoluted lies’.

His advice to readers is that ‘In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high’.  This, clearly, is a matter of opinion.

You can read more about him here.

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I don’t usually write about verse – being of a more prosaic turn of mind – but I couldn’t resist all the convergences around this one. The ‘Convergence of the Twain’ is a poem written by Hardy on hearing of the loss of the Titanic in 1912. Now the Titanic has been in the news again recently. There is of course the 1997 film, and the 2012 re-issue of it in 3D to coincide with the centenary of the sinking. Then we had the re-enactment of the voyage – minus the iceberg; this seemed to me in pretty poor taste, given the regulatory and operation failures that contributed to the deaths of so many of the poor emigrants locked away below decks. Here in Australia we have also had the promise from coal mining magnate Clive Palmer to build a replica of the Titanic, which he can apparently afford to do, even though – or perhaps because – his various companies pay little or no tax. And finally there is a joke doing the rounds – which like many other jokes is not funny – which says ‘our children ask us what the Titanic was. Their children will ask them what an iceberg was’. You can read the poem below.

The form of the poem is interesting, each stanza having two short lines and one long one, all rhyming. This is a variant of a ballad form, and has the driving rhythm of a ballad, which is crucial to the idea of two forces – the ship and the iceberg – inexorably moving closer. For these are the two forces of the title, the ‘twain’, an archaic word for two, or a pair, which are brought together with such disastrous consequences.

The first stanza introduces Hardy’s theme of the foolishness of human vanity. What was planned in pride is now isolated on the seabed. ‘A solitude’ of the sea, I take to suggest a specific location, rather than the general solitude of the sea. He then goes on to describe the wreck. In the second stanza, he evokes the remains of the engine room. ‘Late the pyres of her salamandrine fires’ is difficult. ‘Pyres’ suggests funeral pyres – and the whole ship is a coffin, though I don’t think that fire was an issue in its sinking. ‘Salamandrine fires’ suggest the salamander – the mythical creature that can live in fire. I think Hardy is describing the engine room as something that was once the site of the fire and energy that drove the ship (yes Clive, her engines were coal fired), and seemed enduring, like the salamander. But now the only activity is that of the tide, threading through the steel as if plucking at the strings of a lyre. And he is right about there being internal ocean tides – I checked.

Hardy then contrasts the opulence of the fittings of the ship, and the jewels of the rich passengers, with the indifference of the grotesque creatures and the darkness at the bottom of the ocean. The words ‘bleared and black and blind’ are wonderfully alliterative – and onomatopoeic – and the repetition of ‘and’ is like a hammer driving in his meaning.

In the sixth stanza, Hardy turns from the lovely image of the ship designed to slice its way through the ocean – the ‘cleaving wing’ being the bow wave – to the other great object which is being fashioned: ‘the sinister mate’. The ‘Imminent Will’ is fate, rather than God, since Hardy suffered from what has been called ‘failed faith’. But there is nevertheless intention in the workings of fate ‘that stirs and urges everything’. Thus fate is preparing the iceberg, quite separate – ‘dissociate’- from the preparation of the ‘gaily great’ ship. Giving a capital ’S’ to ‘Shape of Ice’ gives a mythic quality to the iceberg. I like ‘the smart ship’; it suggests the pride of human contrivance, as well as the fashionable, opulent interior. They seem alien – not ‘twain’ at all, but this is only a human view, fate knowing better. The words ‘intimate welding’ carry the metaphorical cargo of both the sense of the personal intimacy of a wedding or physical union, and the mechanical reality of the metal, or welded hull, crushing up against the iceberg so that the two are stuck together and can’t be separated. Hardy packs a lot of meaning into these two words. ‘Twin halves’ echoes the ‘twain’ of the title, suggesting the ship and the iceberg are two physical halves of the same whole. Hardy restates their destiny to be joined in some ‘August’ event, here meaning stately or majestic (rather than month, since the Titanic sank in April). He is describing the journey of these two huge objects towards each other as if they were necessary parts of some dignified dance.

In the last stanza, Hardy breaks the slowly escalating rhythm of the ship and the iceberg coming together with the sudden exclamation of ‘Now!’ signifying the dreadful clash. The Spinner of the Years is again destiny, with perhaps an echo of the spinning Norns of Norse mythology. Obeying their fate –which ‘each one hears’ as if they are alive – their collision is described again with the image of marriage – ‘consummation’.  And the collision did jar two hemispheres, resulting in outrage in both Britain and the United States, and shattering popular faith in technology. Looking back, the collision seems like an augury of things to come, as nature strikes back at human arrogance. I’d watch out if I was Clive Palmer.

If you have enjoyed this discussion, you can find more like it on a new blog called The Poetry Room, www.thepoetryroom.com which is devoted to discussion of poetry of all kinds.

        I

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’. . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great –
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

If you like this poem, have a look at a modern version written by Simon Armitage in response to 9/11.

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