Greek Revival

Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody unfolds as an elaborate and imaginative work of discovery and scholarship. The novel takes the form of a Canadian doctoral student’s English-language translation and extensively footnoted presentation of an otherwise unknown epic contemporaneous with the Iliad. The poem he has discovered, the Psoad, tells the story of the Trojan War through the experiences of a Greek soldier who is, at least compared with the likes of Achilles and Agamemnon, the “son of nobody.” In its learned and playful reinterpretation of long-familiar stories, Martel’s latest brings to mind both Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey and Arthur Phillips’s The Tragedy of Arthur.

The book will, I predict, be divisive for readers, even those accustomed to Martel’s storytelling games. By this I mean that you might be annoyed by the structure. Perhaps you find footnotes clever but distracting; if so, you’re probably not going to like Son of Nobody itself. Or perhaps you’ll apply some kind of cost-benefit analysis to moving back and forth between the primary text and the secondary matter, eventually realizing their mutual influence. Regardless, the arrangement can be both persuasive and tedious in showing us, through an imitation of academic conventions, how our own times and experiences condition our efforts to understand and describe distant times and experiences. Not everyone will find the hoped-for amounts of pleasure and edification in reading a contemporary novel built like an annotated edition of another text, like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. But I will say this: almost anyone engaging with this book will be impressed by its construction.

The narrator, Harlow Donne, is studying classics at a university on the prairies when he wins a coveted year-long research fellowship at Oxford. Shortly after he arrives in England — where he’s been asked to contribute to an ongoing project led by Franklin Cubitt, “one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri”— he encounters pieces of a lost poem in a container full of various fragments inscribed with ancient Greek characters. “Words appeared, in all the awkward glory of early writing,” he says to his young daughter. “I was reminded of you, Helen.”

The entire scholarly apparatus, in fact, is written to her. So the rather extensive footnotes to Harlow’s translation — named after the epic’s hero, the commoner Psoas — are not entirely academic; the peritext in Gina Apostol’s metafictional The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is similar. In his notes, Harlow moves back and forth between explication of the old lines, intertextual commentary on the Iliad, and discussions of his difficult family situation, with his failing marriage and his beloved young daughter, who is in poor health.

As the two-tier, double-tracked story develops, more of both Helen’s situation and Psoas’s emerges: the former in the commentary, the latter in the main text. This unveiling happens alongside Harlow’s intertwined reflections on the full scope of a human life. Drawing on both Greek and Christian concepts, he forges connections between a heroic life that took shape millennia ago, amid a seemingly endless war, and that of his child, which is quieter but still replete with hardship.

The forgotten epic, in Martel’s whole-cloth fashioning, challenges our well-established understanding of the events of the Trojan War, determined as it is by Homer’s focus on the great words and deeds of gods, royals, and high-born heroes in conflict with one another. In the Psoad, we see an unknown commoner come up with military tactics that Odysseus claims as his own. Instead of helping the king of Sparta, Menelaus, and his army retrieve Helen from Troy, Psoas violently kills an “obscure” Trojan prince for insulting his wife. “Not an hour goes by that I don’t think of her,” he shouts to the dying man, “not a day that I am happy in her absence.” The mortal confrontation shocks onlookers on both sides because of the combatants’ vast difference in social status. Through Psoas, we glimpse a civilian’s perspective on how dispiriting and enraging it is to be pulled away from home for ten years because of a fight between elite men. He has few hopes beyond staying alive and making a little money while doing so — and he struggles on both counts. This ambitious, pointed retelling recalls the relationship between Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, between Percival Everett’s James and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and even between all those Heated Rivalry books by Rachel Reid and their predecessors, like Scott Young’s A Boy at the Leafs Camp.

I suspect there will be conflicting responses to the ranging and — on Martel’s part — intentionally uneven nature of the scholar’s contemporary English-language edition of the Psoad. “We groaned with glad strain as we flew across the sea” sounds grand and Homeric, while Paris telling his father, the Trojan king Priam, about his visit with Menelaus is parodically anachronistic and demotic, with such lines as “absconded with his treasury” and “also stole his hot wife.” Many readers will not agree with the choices Harlow makes off the page, especially when it comes to balancing his intellectual curiosities and ambitions with his commitments as a husband and father. He’s so excited by his discovery that even after his family situation back on the prairies turns grave, he decides to remain in Oxford. I can’t imagine anyone condoning Harlow’s behaviour when he doesn’t go home to his wife and daughter at the time they need him most because he’s so invested in annotating an old poem (even if it’s to and for Helen, for reasons that become clear only near the end). This decision refracts throughout the rest of his personal and professional life.

I don’t want to say much more than that, to preserve the genuine surprises and reactions this novel will inspire. But I will say that a second run through Son of Nobody reveals just how ingeniously Martel has both created and told a tale about the stories we tell one another and ourselves. “What is it that makes a hero a hero?” reads the discovered and reconstituted version of the Psoad. In this translation, Harlow poses a question that the words and deeds of the epic itself answer in abundant and affecting ways, even while, in his own life, his answers aren’t nearly as inspiring.