House of Names
Colm Tóibín
Picador
In House of Names, Colm Tóibín takes the protagonists and bloodied events in the Ancient Greek tragedy of the House of Atreus, as told by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and re-shapes them into the modern novel form. His main accomplishment is to give a voice, hungry for justice, to the figure of Clytemnestra.
In the first and best third of the book, she tells how she murdered her husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia in order to secure good winds and the gods’ favour in the battle of Troy. The gods are absent here: “I live alone in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.” Characters can no longer say it was the gods that incited them to murder, and with no Chorus to comfort and bolster, Electra – more powerful in the old plays – is reduced and warped by neuroticism. In novel form, Tóibín develops his three protagonists’ interiority, humanising them with godless motives and failings.
Although seemingly unlike any of his previous work, House of Names bears similarities to his novella The Testament of Mary, where, stripped of religious meaning, suffering and brutal events cannot be justified. Here, the body is written back in, and the violence is more savage in its detail. Tóibín cannot resist throwing in some Irish references, to the Children of Lir, to banshees, Cúchulainn’s trials; and he even recreates a Catholic boarding school in the alternative story he invents to fill Orestes’ missing years. With House of Names, Tóibín adds another layer to a timeless mythic tradition.
Words – Maryam Madani
