The Penelopiad

Canongate books launched an ambitious publishing project this fall with the release of three titles, A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson, and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. The Myths series will continue releasing these retold myths -- from authors like Chinua Achebe, Donna Tartt, David Grossman, and A. S. Byatt -- at the rate of a couple a year, for many years. They are slim, alluringly small volumes, about two-thirds the size of the average hardcover novel, and about 200 pages. The cover art slips around the spine seamlessly, with no vacuous blurbs to disrupt the minimal but intensely pleasing illustrations. I mention the aesthetic qualities of the books because I feel they were intended to be part of the experience of the books in a more integral way than your average novel: the uniform, complimentary beauty of these three volumes suggests that all subsequent volumes will be equally delicious, and thus stimulate the appetites of book collectors.

The Penelopiad, in particular, takes advantage of the beholder's fixed gaze: its cover, over a two-tone gray background, has a simple line drawing of a woman's profile, with an orange and pink anemone around her eye; but turning the book in one's hands, the back offers a startling scene of twelve long-haired silhouettes, dangling from a rope. Readers of Margaret Atwood will not be surprised that she chose this myth to retell -- and refocus, with modern lens pointed squarely at an act ancients would not have considered a crime: the murder of Penelope's twelve maids by Odysseus and Telemachus. Like her novel Alias Grace, a fictional retelling of one of Canada's most notorious murders, The Penelopiad gives voice to the women -- Penelope herself, primarily, with a dramatic chorus of the twelve maids. Giving women a voice turns Homer's Odyssey inside out, revealing the stories within the story -- or rather, the possibilities of the stories within the story, because the maids offer a version slightly different from Penelope's. Atwood, a modern myth-maker with her classic The Handmaid's Tale, was a natural choice for the editors at Canongate; who could bring style, poignancy, and insight to an ancient myth, if not Margaret Atwood?

She begins by setting the scene: Penelope in Hades, wandering "the fields of Asphodel," occasionally peering in on the living through the eyes of a medium, apparently picking up her anachronistic language on such excursions.

I was very interested in the invention of the light bulb, for instance, and in the matter-into-energy theories of the twentieth century. More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines.

Atwood likes to wink at us this way, we contemporary readers, from another time and place, as if to say, "we'll all be ancient history someday." It is perhaps the most charming aspect of the retelling, placing Penelope in the present and in the past simultaneously, subtly linking her story and ours. Atwood also dually places the maids by making them a vaudevillian chorus line instead of a traditional Greek chorus, that punctuates Penelope's chatty narration with playground rhymes, ballads, and even a sea-shanty. In this way, Atwood explores the condition of women in ancient times -- conditions that went without saying in Homer's Odyssey -- especially the slave women, who were, of course, completely disenfranchised. It feels less anachronistic when the women speak, since they are linked to the past but privy to the future. Penelope unravels the tangled tale of Odysseus's long absence, the rumors of his adventures, the suitors who wanted to replace him, and how she directed her most trusted maids to spy on the suitors and keep her informed. When Odysseus returns, he believes the maids have been in league with the suitors all along, and after slaughtering the men, instructs the maids to take care of the bodies and scrub the blood from the floors. Then, Telemachus hangs them "all in a row from the ship's hawser," all while Penelope slept.

For all the promise -- all the stylistic grandeur of the series' enterprise -- The Penelopiad feels like Atwood producing a small, graceful yawn. It is simple, it is clean, it is at times quite lovely, but there's none of the emotional potency of books like The Handmaid's Tale or Alias Grace. The real let down is the end. Though Atwood provocatively titles the chapter of the maids' death "Odysseus and Telemachus Snuff the Maids," the moment of the massacre flits by in less than a page and the maids respond not with a gut-wrenching lament but with "An Anthropology Lecture," which outlines their existence as symbols of the patriarchal destruction of "a matrilineal moon-cult." Suggesting that the murder of the maids is akin to the most violent and heinous kind of pornography (and thus connecting their deaths, perhaps, to the contemporary media's fascination with dead/missing women?) is much more interesting than sarcastic proclamations like the concluding remarks of the anthropology lecture. "You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol." The weakest chapter is "The Trial of Odysseus as Videotaped by the Maids," which is a campy, half-hearted recreation of a televised courtroom drama, complete with pounding gavel. Where Atwood suggests modern connections here, she merely glances then retreats back to Penelope's wry, distanced authority.

Commissioning established writers for a series like this seems a little tricky, which is perhaps why the books are such lovely objects, so that they are not judged solely by what one author produces, but as a collective effort, as one of many aesthetically-pleasing efforts. It is interesting that Margaret Atwood's name looms over the smaller title of the book (not uncommon, I realize), as if Canongate were selling a beautiful book by Margaret Atwood, the great and famous writer of serious literature, as opposed to selling one of a series of retold myths which have persisted for centuries, across cultures and languages. When I gaze at the book -- which I can't bring myself to call "Atwood's book" since its inception and design so clearly belong to others -- I get the distinct feeling of a patient in a medical trial, suspicious she is the recipient of the placebo. It looks like an Atwood, it even tastes like an Atwood, but I don't feel I'm getting the benefit of an Atwood. Only the subsequent volumes will tell how successful The Myths series will be, and in reality, even Margaret Atwood sleepwalking through a myth is more compelling than most contemporary fiction.

I'm reminded though, of a series of books New Directions put out in the 1940s (not because I was there, but because I have a handful of the volumes on my shelves), called The Makers of Modern Literature. Pleasingly small and simply but elegantly designed, this series included E.M. Forster by Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf by David Daiches, and Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov, among others. An intriguing series of books, by famous writers, about famous writers, but pretty dull. When those of us who read literature find that our literary appetites don't match up to our literary aspirations -- that is, when we realize that we admire Kafka, for example, but get no pleasure out of reading The Trial, or when we realize that we may never, despite gnawing guilt and feelings of inadequacy, get through one tenth of Swann's Way -- we begin to fetishize books. The great writers, the classics, the cult favorites; '60s paperbacks, Modern Library or Everyman editions, obscure first printings -- every reader has his or her own collection of book-objects. We invest so much in these books, we want so much to be enlarged by them, made more thoughtful, or more real somehow, as if our participation in the continuing narrative of these books, these objects, will connect us to our living narratives -- our world here and now -- in ways we had not anticipated. And for that reason, one might guess that The Myths, in the hands of capable storytellers like Atwood and Winterson, and coming as they do from history -- the narrative of humanity -- will find an interested and generous audience among readers and collectors alike.

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