Loosely based on the Oresteiad and told from the perspectives of Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra in the first person and Orestes in the third person.
This summary of the plot contains spoilers: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get fair winds so he can sail off to war. His wife Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, can't forgive this. So, she starts a relationship with Aegisthus, a rival claimant for the throne, and, when Agamemnon returns, Clytemnestra murders him. She and Aegisthus begin a reign of tyranny, kidnapping the children of leading citizens in order to ensure their compliance. Clytemnestra's son Orestes is also sent away with these boys but he and another boy Leander escape with Mitros, a very sick boy. They find refuge at the house of an old woman. After some years, the old woman and Mitros die and Orestes and Leander return home. Leander joins the rebels while Orestes, still ignorant of who killed his father, resumes his place at the palace. But, when he discovers what really happened, he kills his mother. The rebels capture the palace.
I just didn't understand why Toibin used the characters and much of the story from an incredibly well-known myth and then introduced such significant differences. If you want to rewrite the story, change the names. Otherwise you run the risk of readers like me becoming distracted by the discrepancies. And they're not little tweaks. I can just about accept the truncation of the war from ten years to three, although this means that it doesn't really give time for Orestes to grow up. But the fundamental is in the character of Orestes, here portrayed as young, naive and rather wimpy (despite committing several murders). In the original he is faced with a stark choice: he has to fulfil his duty of avenging his father's death but the only way he can do this is by matricide. And the aftermath is that he is driven mad by guilt and that it is only after he has been tried and shown mercy that he can resume his kingly duties (becoming a rather unpleasant warlord). None of that is in here. So Toibin has taken away the fundamental dramatic and psychological crux of the story to produce this emasculated, rationalised version. So why keep the names?
Of course it is beautifully written. It's Toibin. He's good.
Selected quotes:
- "I know as no one else knows that the gods ... care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree." (Clytemnestra, 1)
- "Leander and Orestes possessed a set of references that were like a private language; in the old woman's house, the discussion of weather or food of farm animals had evolved into a sort of mild banter with many comments exchanged on each other's failings and incapacities." (Orestes 1) I like this quote but it appears after the sojourn with the old woman almost as an afterthought: this 'banter' has not been shown before; I think it should have been.
February 2023; 262 pages
Other books by Colm Toibin reviewed in this blog:
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