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";s:4:"text";s:22067:"One of the reasons Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and Nora Webster are such loved novels is that they give mythic grace to ordinary women’s lives. Toibin instead pictures Clytemnestra having silently to endure Agamemnon’s repetitive and empty boasting to his troops, before she can get him inside to kill him. (In one version of the story, dramatized by Euripides, Artemis miraculously rescued the girl at the very moment of sacrifice.) For Brooklyn or Enniscorthy, this works because both he and the reader know the places and people he is talking about so well: our knowledge of the 1950s and 60s, whether garnered from experience, films or talk, rises up to fill the gaps and a legend is made. It is this, for example, that transforms his account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia from what could all too easily have been a ghastly version of operatic bombast into a moving tragedy on a human scale. The eponymous House of Names, where Orestes spends some years, is a semi-abandoned coastal farm with sheep (definitely not bronze age), chickens and a crone straight out of Synge who can reduce all the battles of the world to a single tale. Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Tiepolo, 1735. Orestes, looking at his sister in the closing pages, “saw his mother.”. Sometimes, jumping on guards and poking their eyes out with precocious competence, he seems a hardened thug; sometimes, like his mother and sister, a victim of trauma; sometimes a lost, childlike big softy, tragically in love with his friend Leander. Where he has been in the interim is never clear, and Tóibín devotes himself to filling this gap. How far was Clytemnestra justified in punishing Agamemnon for killing Iphigenia? A Pair of Updated Greek Tragedies Startle Us Anew. Part of Toibin’s success comes down to the power of his writing: an almost unfaultable combination of artful restraint and wonderfully observed detail. Are you sure you want to delete this item from your shopping cart? Secure shopping. Orestes and a couple of his friends escape, and in what is almost a mini Homeric “Odyssey” in the center of the book, two of them eventually make it back home. Kate Clanchy’s The Not-Dead and the Saved and Other Stories is published by Picador. Was he in exile in Athens? Electra gradually becomes her mother; and toward the end of the book Toibin gives her very much the same lines that Clytemnestra spoke at the beginning, and the same distrust in divine power. See Terms of Use for details. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Vann sets out to dispel that misleading familiarity and so starts his tale much earlier in the myth, when Medea is escaping by sea from her father’s house with her lover Jason and the prized Golden Fleece, which she had helped him steal. Here, in a further wry twist, Toibin deflates another grandstand moment of Greek tragedy. There has been enough death”), we sense that he may have lost his way with this character too. To order a copy for £ 11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. How come Clytemnestra’s lover Aegisthus can walk through doors and walls, and is he really in control of all the wars, and if so, why? “I could smell the blood of the animals as it began to sour and there were vultures in the sky so it was all death ... Iphigenia cried out ... the cry was that of a girl.” Even more authentic seems the torture meted out to Clytemnestra at the site, when she is seized and buried alive for three days: after all, what else would you do with the howling evidence of such grief and betrayal except put it in a hole and lay a stone over it? It starts to feel not so much mythic as random, or, worse, a bit CGI, a bit too close to Game of Thrones. The Greeks themselves often claimed that his whole line had been under a curse from the very moment that its progenitor had committed sacrilege by trying to serve the gods human flesh for dinner (human sacrifice ran in the family). Aeschylus’ trilogy, the “Oresteia,” starts with Agamemnon’s victorious return to Mycenae from Troy quickly followed by his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra (in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter); it goes on to the murder of Clytemnestra by her son, Orestes (in revenge for her killing of his father); and it ends with the trial of Orestes and his eventual acquittal — on the grounds that the death of a man counts for more than that of a woman. Tóibín has always been a marvellously spare writer: he never describes a face or a room, instead evoking them with occasional sparse details. Aeschylus has him produce personal tokens (including a lock of hair) to prove his identity. Either would have made a novella every bit as fine and angry as Tóibín’s Testament of Mary: like that book, both seem destined for another life on the stage. But in comparing the modern versions of ancient myth offered by Toibin and Vann, it is also not hard to conclude that restraint is often more powerful than flamboyance. Part of it is also to do with the way Toibin engages with the ancient texts that define the story. • House of Names is published by Viking. She makes the journey in the belief that Iphigenia is to marry Achilles and arrives with a wedding dress at the ready, only to be painfully disabused by Achilles himself. His description of Agamemnon playing sword games with little Orestes in a vain attempt to normalize the hours before his sister is taken to the sacrificial altar is unforgettable. The whole book is in fact full of body parts and appalling violence, so that by the end the murder of the children seems gentle by comparison (though she does drink blood directly from the throat of one). Clytemnestra and Electra have no such closing address, but their voices and their unresolved, unresolvable, bitterly human distress speak past their deaths and past the end of the novel, all the better for their ahistorical, bluescreen background. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Orestes has given his name to the modern title of Aeschylus’ trilogy, the “Oresteia.” But his story seems to suffer some particularly serious holes. In his quest to give personality and feeling to this unfortunate cipher of the gods, he has overstuffed him and fatally blurred his edges. One other famous scene in the “Oresteia” focused on how Electra recognized her brother when he came back after so many years. Framed History And Complete History - Pine, We use cookies to enhance your personalized experience for ads, analytics, and more. What responsibility lay with the gods? Orestes never tells us how he feels about the death of his sister, father and mother, any more than Eilis says who she truly loves; and no one around him mentions it either, as if all Mycenae were keeping the codes of County Wexford. Was he saved by his nurse and hidden away for decades in northern Greece? Many such pleasures lie under the surface of “House of Names.” But Toibin has bigger themes in mind too, particularly the cycle of violence that appears to trap the family of Agamemnon. Digital Products on Checkout, all other products filled in 1 business day, Entire site uses SSL / Secure Certificate. All this results in a devastatingly human story. Rather than turning human-sized stories into myths, Tóibín sets out to humanise the myths of the house of Atreus: of Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes and daughters Iphigenia and Electra, protagonists of the Iliad and of subtly different plays by Aeschylus and Euripides. Euripides’ play now seems one of the most easily comprehensible works of Greek tragedy: A woman scorned by her husband desperately kills their children. This “recognition scene” was already such a well-known cliché in Athens a few decades later that Euripides parodied it in one of his versions of the story (the lock of hair is rejected as unpersuasive; instead, a childhood scar confirms Orestes’ identity). But he is also very good at exploiting the puzzling gaps in the ancient narrative, especially where Orestes is concerned. “The longer his jousting went on, the more I realized that he was afraid of us, or afraid of what he would have to say to us when it stopped. BBB A plus rating.. Subscribe to our Newsletter to receive early discount offers, latest news, sales and promo information. Tóibín removes the Greek gods: not one is mentioned by name in the whole novel. Toibin’s aim of making Greek myth startle us afresh is shared by David Vann in his novel “Bright Air Black,” a reworking of the story of Medea (the title quotes Euripides’ “Medea”: “The gods…turn the bright air black”). Even the landscape seems Irish: Orestes travels across a bare, rocky plain with fog and rabbits, rather than the wooded hills of Homer. Tóibín seeks out more human motives: she envied Iphigenia’s prettiness and her wedding dress; her mother did not give her enough attention; her mother overshadowed her and repressed her probably lesbian sexuality. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Their fleet, so the story went, was becalmed, and the price that the goddess Artemis demanded for giving them a fair wind was that King Agamemnon, the commander in chief, should perform a human sacrifice — of his own daughter, Iphigenia. In all the fog and silence, it also becomes hard to make out Orestes himself. But we don’t know this maybe-bronze-age, maybe-Homeric world at all, or how its society is supposed to work, and as Orestes wanders ever more confusingly over it, bumping occasionally into Goya- esque scenes of violence, we begin to wonder if Tóibín does either. By Mary Beard. Removing this item from your shopping cart will remove your associated sale items. Plays by Sophocles and Euripides also focus on the supporting role of Orestes’ sister Electra in the slaughter of their mother. His 11th novel reverses the process. HouseOfNames.com is a retail site for Surname Origin, Last Name Origin, Family Coat of Arms, Family Shields and Family Crests prints. Toibin offers an even less comfortable version rooted in a different kind of inheritance, as throughout the book we see the characters learning to step into (or failing to step out of) the terrible roles their parents once filled. Scribner. Tóibín sticks, however, to the tense and dramatic point of view of the Aeschylus play, so that Clytemnestra tells her story as she waits for Agamemnon to return from Troy so she can murder him in her turn. Athenian tragedy. He is held for a while in a prison where groups of boys are forced to live in silence, take weekly baths together, and write down one another’s sins on “slates” – as if in a boarding school run by the Christian Brothers. Most ancient writers agreed that young Orestes was sent away from Mycenae around the time of his father’s murder and returned only years later to be reunited with his sister Electra and to murder their mother. In his new novel, “House of Names,” Colm Toibin explores part of this story, from the murder of Iphigenia to the murder of Clytemnestra, making it strike a new chord, far more impressive than the pious respect or worthy aura of “classicism” that often surrounds it. Most convincing, though, is her sheer volatility: like her mother, this Electra is permanently on edge, alternately cowed and violent, and is all too recognisable as a victim of torture and war. What were the proper limits to vengeance? In the first pages we discover she has killed and dismembered her brother and is scattering his limbs into the water to slow her father’s pursuit (as he will pause to collect the remains). HOUSE OF NAMES By Colm Toibin 275 pp. The project begins, fittingly for a writer so concerned with mothers, with Clytemnestra. Toibin takes this one step further. And the prose style too is part of the defamiliarizing process: short, rhythmic, flamboyantly “primitive” sentences, regularly omitting the verb “to be” (“Night prolonged, Hekate hearing” is typical). The sacrifice scene, bereft of mythic grace, is savage, sordid and hauntingly believable. When his girlfriend Ianthe explains that he really doesn’t know which way is up, he seems just depressingly dim: “‘I am not the father of the child?’ Orestes asked. To order a copy for £ 11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. I would like to say too, Cabaniss, is in N.C. moore county, of this name is Caviness, I think with the accent, itbe b sounded like v, reguardlesx, our Cabaniss who came here was Henri and Marie Cabanniss , from longuenes france ame in 1701. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we sense that he may lost... Were repeatedly retold in Greek mythology, a highlight in the interim is never,! 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