Title Where Three Roads Meet Series Canongate's The Myth Author Salley Vickers Cover Art --- Publisher Canongate - 2005 First Printing Canongate - 2005 Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Freud, Tiresias Main Elements Mytholog

In the latest retelling of the world’s greatest stories in the Myth series from Canongate, the highly regarded novelist Salley Vickers brings to life the Western world’s most widely known myth, Oedipus, through a shrewdly told exploration of the seminal story in conversation between Freud and Tiresias.

It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from the debilitating effects of cancer, has been permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna. He seeks refuge in England, taking up residence in the house in Hampstead in which he will die fifteen months later. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger who comes and goes according to Freud’s state of health. Who is the mysterious visitor and why has he come to tell the famed proponent of the Oedipus complex his strangely familiar story?

Set partly in prewar London and partly in ancient Greece, Where Three Roads Meet is as brilliantly compelling as it is thoughtful. Former psychoanalyst and acclaimed novelist Salley Vickers revisits a crime committed long ago that still has disturbing reverberations for us all today.

The Canongate series can either be really good, or really terrible (often having just one line or paragraph to tie the tale into the myth it was supposedly retelling, and sometimes boring as heck). But this is one of the better ones, this really is a retelling of the myth of Oedipus.

Freud is famous for basing his analysis of psychology on mythology, because of course all little boys want to have sex with their mothers, and kill their fathers out of jealousy. All because there was one, and only one, myth where that happened...except Oedipus didn't even know what he was doing so "want" is a bit of a stretch here. I was never much for Freud and his penis-envy stuff either, I think all this theories say more about his own personal perversions than it does about any real science or psychology.

Anyway, that aside, we start the book with Freud dying from mouth cancer, he was a major smoker of cigars after all. This part is quite gruesome and harrowing, not that our medical techniques are all that much better really, but he went through torture. While he's alone in the hospital one day, a blind man shows up claiming to be Tiresias, the priest that pronounced the prophecy to Laius, Oedipus' father, that any son he had would one day kill him and marry his wife. Of course, by attempting to leave Oedipus to die as an infant, he made the prophecy come true, as the child was rescued and raised by another family.

Tiresias basically retells the story of Oedipus to Freud, who probably considers his companion a drug induced hallucination, but enjoys his company just the same. And so, one gets not just the tale of Oedipus but also some musing about the events, and the world in general. There are no happy endings for either Freud or Oedipus, but it helped to fill in some holes in my mythology readings I was doing all year, I'd only encountered a very brief account of the myth before, but here it goes into great detail (if you don't mind the random meanderings the retelling provokes).