A new world Odyssey
Canada’s literary queen rewrites Homer from Penelope’s point of view
Quentin Mills-Fenn

A few years ago, in Edinburgh, Margaret Atwood was accosted over breakfast.

Her assailant was a publisher named Jamie Byng, who had a wacky venture he just had to tell her about. Byng thought it would be a grand idea to round up several internationally famous authors and persuade them to rewrite some myths, coming up with their own versions of the ancient stories that still haunt us today.

Canada’s literary grande dame was caught at her weakest moment, she says, just before her Corn Flakes. Thus lacking in willpower, she agreed.

And so it is that Atwood came to participate in Byng’s Myths series with her latest book, The Penelopiad (Knopf Canada).

Another participant in the series, Jeannette Winterson, claims that she knew immediately which myth she wanted to work with. Her version of the story of Atlas, Weight, was published at the same time as Atwood’s book.

Atwood had no such instant inspiration, however. She tried several different legends, including some native American stories, but nothing worked. She couldn’t make her characters come alive and even thought about dropping out of the project.

Then she returned to one of her first loves: the myths of the ancient Greeks and, in particular, the legend of Odysseus, King of Ithaca and hero of The Odyssey, and his long-suffering wife, Penelope.

In Atwood‚s recreation of the story, Penelope is the central character. While her adventuring husband is off fighting the Trojan War, she stays at home, defending her husband’s kingdom from the ravenous suitors who eat their way through Ithaca’s treasury. She busies herself raising their impertinent teenage son, Telemachus; and she uses her female slaves, her maids, to spy on her enemies.

Penelope’s cousin, the beautiful and selfish Helen of Troy, makes several comic appearances. And then, after twenty years of wandering, Odysseus returns to his wife and home and there’s a reconciliation scene. Odysseus kills the suitors who were trying to steal kingdom and, for good measure, he ruthlessly kills Penelope’s 12 maids, for sleeping with the enemy, so to speak.

It’s this last bit of the Odysseus story that has always troubled Atwood.

As a writer, Atwood says, “all that concerns you is unfinished business. I read the Odyssey when I was 15 and the maids always bothered me. I read the Robert Graves’ translation maybe a year later. I know the material quite well, so it was probably available to me, in a way.

“The thing that really interested me was the Maids,” she says. “When you examine the evidence against them, there really wasn’t much. If Penelope didn’t like what they were doing, she could have gotten rid of them. They were slaves: she could have sold them.

“Even Odysseus says they were raped by the suitors.

“All these people — Helen and Odysseus and Telemachus — have had a lot written about them. Odysseus especially has had a lot dedicated to him. Without him, there couldn’t have been a Trojan War. And, because of Odysseus, the Greeks won the Trojan War because he came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse.

“With Penelope, there’s some stuff,” Atwood adds, “but in the Odyssey, she‚s not very interesting. She goes to sleep during all the big moments."

In the book, Atwood interrupts her telling of the story with some choral interludes courtesy of the maids. Of course, choruses are a prominent feature in Greek drama, but it’s unlikely that the ancient dramatists featured sea shanties in their work. Or an anthropology lecture.

“I enjoyed (the choruses) a lot,” Atwood says. “We did a reading of about a quarter of the book in London. We had three actresses doing the maids. They sang and played their own instruments.
“And Helen was fabulous: we put her in sunglasses and some tacky jewelry.”

“When I read from the book, people say ‘You’re not being very kind to Helen,’ Atwood says. “But I had a lot of fun writing Helen. She has more fun than Penelope. She’s willing to go to a girls’ night in Vegas. Penelope doesn’t want to take the chance.

It’s remarkable how intimate Atwood’s knowledge is of the figures.

“They were all related. Helen, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra: they were all closely connected,” Atwood says. “Think about Penelope’s family: her father tried to throw her into the sea. Her mother was a Naiad (a water deity} and she couldn’t have been around much. Then she gets all this grief from her teenage son.

“We know Odysseus must have been charming, despite his famously short legs,” she adds. “Most of the people who helped him in The Odyssey and The Iliad were women. He must have had something.

“We’re told this guy is a trickster. How do we know that what he says is true? By their own accounts (Penelope and Odysseus) lied their heads off.” Atwood reunites her long-separated couple but, even though there is a strong bond between the two, Odysseus can’t stay in the same place for too long. In the Underworld, while Penelope thinks about her days on earth, Odysseus sets off to join the living periodically, just like Helen and her visits to Las Vegas.

“Even at the end of The Odyssey, he has to set off,” Atwood says.

“It’s a mixed ending,” she adds. “There’s a very touching (reunion) scene in The Odyssey and a lot of people end it there, if they’re telling the Romantic plot. We like happy endings.

“But (Odysseus) comes and goes. He’s a sea-farin’ man,” she laughs.