For this
novel, Tóibín borrowed from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and then used
his imagination to retell a story from Greek mythology.
The novel
opens with Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband Agamemnon who sacrificed their
daughter Iphigenia so the gods would make the winds blow favourably, thereby allowing
the Greek fleet to leave for Troy. Clytemnestra
joined forces with her lover Aegisthus but theirs is not a happy life after
Agamemnon’s death. Her remaining daughter
Electra and son Orestes also suffer as a consequence of their mother’s
actions. Violence breeds resentment and
more violence.
Clytemnestra’s
story is narrated in first person and she, by far, emerges as the most
interesting character. I am certain I am
not the first person to compare her to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, an
ambitious, manipulative woman who has people murdered while pretending to be
weak. She speaks in a “chirping voice”
having “learned to sound stupid” and to pretend that she is “foolish or
distracted,” but Orestes realizes that she “allowed nothing to escape her. . .
Beneath all her simpering and insinuation, there was fury, there was steel.” She is ruthless, but Tóibín succeeds in
humanizing her, at least to some extent.
She is a betrayed wife horrendously deceived by her husband and a heartbroken,
traumatized mother grieving for her daughter.
Love of family is certainly part of her motivation. In her post-death monologue delivered from a
world of “blankness, strangeness, silence,” Clytemnestra speculates, “Maybe the
only reason I wander in these spaces has to do with some . . . feeling, or what
is left of it. Maybe that feeling is
love.” One cannot help but feel some
sympathy for her because she is searching for the son she loves, unaware that
he is guilty of matricide.
Orestes is
the least compelling character.
Interestingly, his sections are narrated in a rather impersonal third
person. The reader learns little about
Orestes’ feelings about the deaths of his sister and father. He seems a very tentative person, unsure of
himself. He is indecisive and is very
much dominated by others. He relies on
his lover Leander: “He felt the warmth
of Lander’s shoulder when he rested his hand on him and the strength of his
will, and this gave him comfort.” Electra makes all of the plans for
Clytemnestra’s killing, having “worked and prepared” for the act, and she
persuades her brother by appealing to his bravery; in the end, Orestes “knew
that he would do as his sister had asked.”
A portion of the novel is dedicated to his five years away from the
palace; I cannot understand why so much focus is given to this insipid young
man who is anything but a Greek hero.
Orestes doesn’t even know about having sex with a woman; he believes a
woman has become pregnant because of him but he has to be told, “’I don’t think
that what we do in the dark can make me pregnant. For that to happen, it must be different.’” As in many of Tóibín’s other novels, it is
the women who are the stronger, more interesting characters.
Tóibín veers
from the original stories by making it clear that characters are responsible
for their actions. What happens is not
the result of gods intervening in events.
In fact, none of the gods are mentioned by name. Clytemnestra emphasizes the disinterest of
gods: “They barely know we are
alive. For them, if they were to hear of
us, we would be like the mild sound of wind in the trees, a distant, unpersistent,
rustling sound.” The reader is to see
that characters’ actions are the result of very human desires and emotions.
The style
is that of understatement. Much is left
unsaid. People don’t ask obvious questions and avoid talking about certain
topics. When Leander returns to his
family, after a five-year absence, “no one wanted to know in any detail
precisely where he had been, or what had happened to him. He had been away from them; that was enough.” When Orestes returns home after five years, “He
found that both his mother and his sister became nervous if they thought that
he was even going to speak.” Instead,
people look for “easy topics to discuss” and “think of something soft and pacifying
to say.” The word “silence” is used at least 50
times. This is in keeping with a palace “full
of lingering echoes and whisperings” where machinations and intrigue
abound. Orestes is warned that “’a trusted friend is
the one you can least trust.’”
Retellings
of classic literature do not always work.
This one does. The novel is not
one of Tóibín’s most memorable perhaps, but it is definitely worth reading; it
gives insight into characters with whom we may be acquainted but whom we do not really
know.
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