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Penguin | Viking
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[dropcap]C[/dropcap]olm Tóibín’s latest novel has been hailed as an Irish Oresteia and an Ancient Greek House of Cards. The novel is, at its heart, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy (with dashes of Sophocles and Homer thrown in for good measure), though where the Greeks sketched their narratives in broad strokes and lines, Tóibín has followed after with colouring pencils, filling in the narrative and characters with quiet interiority and depth.
The success of the novel lies in its ability to render immediate the events of Greek epic, without voiding them of their historicity.
The ancient story of human sacrifice, revenge and matricide is told alternately by three characters of the original plays; Clytemnestra, the husband-killing proto-Lady Macbeth, her son, the disinherited Orestes and her daughter, Electra, whose lack of husband serves as her original Greek counterpart’s main source of strife. Tóibín’s novel invests these characters with a modern, almost Irish, sensibility. There are shades of Nora Webster traceable in Clytemnestra’s grief, her threatened curses and strained relationship with her nearly grown daughter. Familial strife and the stories the characters tell themselves thereof offer analogues of Ireland’s own historic conflict.The Children of Lir and Leda and the Swan are presented as part of the same mythic cycle of violence.
Disillusionment with religion and obsession with the dead permeate the prose. The gods are conspicuously absent in this version while ghosts and memories prowl the labyrinthine palace of Agamemnon, being the “Names” of the lost who refuse to be forgotten.
Human intrigue is, of course, the main driving force of the novel, emphasised by subterranean imagery, secret passageways and meditations upon the nature of truth. The theatricality of the source material gets a nod now and again, with the performative nature of the character’s lives, the roles they play and the fictions they weave alluded to or explicitly observed.
Though impressive for its depth and careful realisation of character (considering its epic scope), House of Names is not as deftly wrought as some of Tóibín’s other fiction. Nevertheless, the success of the novel lies in its ability to render immediate the events of Greek epic, without voiding them of their historicity. This is a novel to be enjoyed Classicists and the uninitiated alike.
