FICTION
Son of Nobody
Yann Martel
Text, $34.99
Yann (Life of Pi) Martel’s fourth is perhaps his most ambitious yet. In fact, Son of Nobody, for the most part, is not a novel at all – though it certainly is novel. It’s composed largely of verse fragments from a fictional lost-and-found alternative to the Iliad of Homer. Martel’s daring creation is the Psoad, the episodic tale of a rustic named Psoas of Midea, who fights for the Greeks at Troy alongside the Homeric heroes Achilles, Diomedes and Ajax. Homer’s rampaging warriors are aristocrats. In contrast, Martel’s Psoas, the “son of nobody”, is a commoner. It’s meant to provide a fresh, edgy, told-from-below take on the Iliad.
Speaking to the faux-antique verses of the Psoad are footnoted comments by the fictional scholar who discovered them, Canadian classicist Harlow Donne. These are addressed by Donne to his daughter, Helen. They blend Iliadic exposition – Dad loves to lecture – with sentimental recollections of family life: marital squabbles and paternal regrets, and, ultimately, loss and tragedy. It’s intended as a sentimental counterpoint to the martial epic and the scholar-sleuth subplot, but the three sit uncomfortably together. The narrator’s inner world is never fully realised while his daughter is little more than a character outline – and a flimsy plot-line.
Most of the book’s 334 pages are divided horizontally. The fragmentary Psoad, at the top, runs in fits and starts. The footnotes and other reflections unfurl below. Vladimir Nabokov used a similar device in Pale Fire.
The Homeric pastiche, which is offered as a subversive retelling of the Iliad spiced with gutter humour and burlesque, purports to be an eyewitness account from a kind of sidekick of the hero Psoas. But it’s no substitute, unsurprisingly, for authentic Greek epic – nor bawdy Aristophanic comedy for that matter.
In the Homeric verses Martel struggles to find a register that’s simultaneously convincing – of its antiquity – and appealing to a contemporary reader. One moment the versified dialogue sounds as if it’s been plucked from the mouth of an Arthurian knight in Victorian-era translation, or a Monty Python parody:
Replied Thromachis of Kos, a merchant,
“Precisely. The harbour seems to have vanished.
But the waters are deep. We are safe, my lord.
I have been here often. I know of what I speak.”
The next it’s striving for a jaunty demotic tone, veering from the stiffly archaic to the clumsily colloquial:
Thersites came up to the son of nobody,
there, not far from the banks of the Scamander,
and said he to him, “Psoas, hello? Hello?
I am speaking to you. You went dog-mad
with Prince Mestor of Troy just now…”
The first of these pseudo-Homeric fragments are, in the prose introduction, rendered as they would have been in ancient Greek: right-to-left then left-to-right with no word separation. We also get a learned disquisition on this boustrophedon – turning “as the ox ploughs” – writing method. It’s a show-offy touch designed to bolster the illusion of scholarly authority.
But the illusion is shattered by the very first line of dialogue in the narrator’s introduction. When Donne is first shown around the Ashmolean Museum’s “vast trove” of antiquities by the curator of the classical Greek section, she explains to him, “This is the Antiquities Study Room. Most of the artefacts here date from the Archaic period, that is from the eight to the fifth centuries BCE when …” For sure, a non-specialist reader might need to know the dates of the Archaic period, but there’s not a Homeric scholar worth their salt who would need schooling on these details.
Martel doesn’t try to replicate the particular poetic metre used in ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry. But he does a decent job in free verse of capturing the brio of battle, and the famously raging insults that Homeric heroes trade across the metaphorical trenches. Psoas’s buddying-up with the fiercely ugly Thersites, an outspoken conscientious objector with a cameo in Homer’s Iliad, is a nice touch. So, too, is the alternative to Homer’s story about the abduction of Helen, queen of Sparta, by a pretty Trojan prince named Paris – principal cause of the Trojan War. Adapting a story preserved by the first century Greek writer Dio Chrysostom, the Psoad tells how Paris and Helen were legitimately married, and the war was in origin a piece of Greek skullduggery.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – assuming that both works are from the same poet – are really strands from a tangled ball of ancient Greek myth that scholars call the epic cycle. These poems, some of which, like the Cypria, have come down to us only in fragments, offer prequels, sequels and variations on the Homeric tales. It is vaguely plausible that the song of a commoner-hero might find a home in the epic cycle. It’s certainly an attractive idea.
It will emerge that Psoas has done something so miraculous that he has, in the narrator’s words, “created the space for the appearance of … Jesus of Nazareth”. More emphatically still: “Jesus came from the incurable lassitude of a Greek soldier at Troy.” This is sub-theological drivel, and it serves to further undermine Harlow Donne’s the narrator’s authority.
Son of Nobody is pitched as a work of originality and sagacity. But aside from Martel’s novel conceit about the proletarian epic hero, the book has simply bolted a bunch of scholar-sleuth clichés onto a narrative device seemingly borrowed from Nabokov. It’s then dressed up with the kind of factual exposition any reader could find in the introduction to a decent translation of the Iliad, and framed with an unconvincing sentimental story.
Anyone curious about Homer should probably dip into the real deal. Anyone who knows Homer already surely has better things to do.
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Luke Slattery is a journalist, critic and author of four works of non-fiction, one of fiction. He is struggling to finish a novel about the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico Della Mirandola.Connect via email.
