Title The Penelopiad Series --- Author Margaret Atwood Cover Art Pentagram Publisher Alfred A. Knopf - 2005 First Printing 2005 Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Penelope, Odysseus, Telemachus Main Elements Gods

In Homer’s account in The Odyssey, Penelope--wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy--is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife, her story a salutary lesson through the ages. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan war after the abduction of Helen, Penelope manages, in the face of scandalous rumours, to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son, and keep over a hundred suitors at bay, simultaneously. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters and sleeping with goddesses, he kills her suitors and--curiously--twelve of her maids.

In a splendid contemporary twist to the ancient story, Margaret Atwood has chosen to give the telling of it to Penelope and to her twelve hanged Maids, asking: "What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?" In Atwood’s dazzling, playful retelling, the story becomes as wise and compassionate as it is haunting, and as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing. With wit and verve, drawing on the storytelling and poetic talent for which she herself is renowned, she gives Penelope new life and reality--and sets out to provide an answer to an ancient mystery.

After having read Circe by Madeline Miller, I started noticing other books (generally about female characters by female authors) based on characters in the Greek myths that didn't get a chance to tell their own stories. In The Odyssey, Penelope doesn't get to do much, and most of what she does is told in third person, so when I saw Atwood had a book from her point of view I knew I had to read it.

I had expected something that told Penelope's story as she lived it, but in fact, she's already dead, wandering the Fields of Asphodel, an interesting depiction on its own, wandering about bumping into people she knew in life, avoiding others, or being avoided herself, for, well, millenia. She has some awareness of what's going on in the outside world though it does seem weird to read the word "condominium" inside a retelling of a Greek myth. And talking of myth...Penelope spends quite a bit of time reflecting on myth versus truth, especially taking into account her husband, famed for his lies and tricks. Was Calypso really a goddess that kept him trapped on an island for years, or was she just some pretty girl he decided to settle down with for a bit? Was Circe a witch or a prostitute in a whorehouse Odysseus stayed at for a year? Penelope couldn't decide in the end and couldn't do anything about it either way. The mythical version was a least more interesting.

Of course, being Atwood, it is a feminist tale. See, towards the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus has massacred all the suitors that wanted Penelope's hand in marriage, perhaps justifiably since they pretty much ate and drank his kingdom into bankruptcy, plus they would have killed him given half a chance, Odysseus then collected up twelve maids that had sexual affairs with those men and put them to death. But, in those days, maids were slaves, it wasn't like they had much of a say as to whether they wanted to sleep with a guest or not, it was one of the things a good host provided, you know, food, drink, a bed, a pretty girl...you know, standard hospitality kind of stuff. There is even a mock trial in the book, where it was attempted to decide if one needed to take the customs of the times into account and call him not guilty, or to say he went too far regardless. Atwood couldn't quite understand why Odysseus did what he did, and decided to give the maids a voice, if only in song and poetry, making them the chorus in a kind of modern Greek play.

I enjoyed Penelope's reflections on her life. Like trying to deal with the fact her father tried to kill her (isn't clear why and since she was an infant she didn't have any answers that weren't in the recorded texts we have access to) but she was rescued by ducks, after all her mother was a Naiad. Apparently Naiads cry a lot, Penelope had fears of turning into a fountain or a pond as had happened to others of her kin. And she certainly had cause to cry. Married at 15 to a man she'd only glimpsed through a window, only to have him go off to war for twenty years shortly after she bears him a son, she spent a lot of time alone. And arguably, she was as clever and intelligent as her husband, but without the malicious streak he may have picked up from being a descendant (possibly two ways, there was a lot of incest going, especially when the gods were involved) from Hermes. Truth was they did seem to be a good match, and one will never know what things might have been like had he not had to go to Troy.

Finally, I felt all my reading of Greek myths this year had paid off. I was able to pick up a book and pick out even the minor and obscure references, like knowing exactly why when the Greek sacrificed to the gods, they only burned some bone and fat, but ate the meat themselves, you'd wonder why the gods would accept that, but that was a trick played on Zeus by Prometheus.

I've now got my eye on some other retellings of the characters without voices, just as Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, or Ariadne that came out only this year. My plan this year had been to read a vast range of mythological pantheons but the more I read of Greek mythology, or even the war of Troy, the more I find on the topic that I can't resist reading!