House Of Names

By Colm Toibin

Viking, £14.99

Review by Alan Taylor

IN Greek mythology, it is never wise to incur the wrath of the gods. Omnipresent and all powerful, they are able to influence the outcome of any situation for good or ill. Their role is multifarious. They can be sage counsellors, generous benefactors or malevolent interferers. On top of all of which, they benefit from being invisible and, like comic book heroes, are imbued with supernatural powers, hence the awe with which they are held by their human pawns. To the Greeks of yore, they were the court of no appeal; what they said went.

The myths are the source of Western literature’s archetypal plots, revived, adapted and embroidered down the centuries by playwrights, filmmakers and novelists. In that regard, Colm Toibin’s attraction to them is understandable. In House Of Names, the Dubliner’s 11th novel, the oft-told story is that which begins with the sacrifice by Agamemnon of his daughter Iphigenia. The “bargain”, as her mother, Clytemnestra, puts it, is “simple”: slit the poor girl’s throat and the wind will be changed, allowing her husband and his men to sail to victory.

“The gods,” reflects Clytemnestra bitterly, “have their own unearthly concerns, unimagined by us. They barely know we are alive. For them, if they were to hear us, we would be like the mild sound of wind in the trees, a distant, unpersistent, rustling sound.”

The opening pages of Toibin’s novel, in which Iphigenia’s brutal murder is coolly described, are the best. Readers, schooled in the box set of Game Of Thrones rather than, say, Robert Graves’s popular if rather academic retelling of the myths, may rub their hands in glee in anticipation of a bloodbath. In that regard at least they will not be disappointed. Iphegenia’s death is soon avenged by her mother,who adroitly dispatches Agamemnon, having previously hooked up with Aesgisthus while her husband was off dealing with the Trojans. Nor, ultimately, will Clytemnestra be spared. As the vengeful Orestes, her son, acknowledges: “I am my father’s son.”

Following the convulsions of this incorrigibly dysfunctional family is no more easy than keeping tabs on the torrid relationships in Hollyoaks. I make no apology for disclosing twists in the plot which one would normally withhold. For, as Toibin himself concedes, he has drawn heavily on works by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides while giving himself licence to introduce characters and events unrecorded by those authors.

The overall effect, however, is anaemic and unsatisfying. Toibin has three narrators: Clytemnestra, Electra, Iphegenia’s sister, and Orestes. The first two’s accounts are supplied in the first person, Orestes’s in the third person. No doubt there is a good reason for this but it was not apparent to me. Perhaps one of the gods has taken on the job of reporting on Orestes. Increasingly, however, one couldn’t care less about what happened to the principal players. They do not seem like real people living in a real time and real place. We know, for example, that they feel things, because we’re told they do, but the unengaged manner in which this is conveyed suggests otherwise.

Of course, it is not necessary to empathise with its characters to be swept along by a novel. But it is curious that such a talented writer as Colm Toibin is unable to make them live and breathe. Reading House Of Names, I could not help but compare it to Brooklyn and Nora Webster, two his more recent books, in which the plainness of the prose fits perfectly their subject: 20th-century Irish women coping with what circumstance has thrown at them. Here, however, I was left wondering whether the gods had spoken and told him to behave himself, or else.