The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (Myths series) [Hardcover]

Ask readers for some adjectives to describe the fiction of Margaret Atwood and most would submit "intense, cerebral, futuristic, feminist," or just plain "weird." Only the most astute would add "funny" to the list. But with The Penelopiad--Atwood's fictional autobiography of the mythic Greek character Penelope, devoted wife of Odysseus and vessel of considerable intrigue in Homer's towering Odyssey--Atwood does the improbable. She resurrects a shadowy literary figure and charms the pants off of us while offering keen analysis (however subjective) of Penelope's motivations. And she makes us chuckle. Coming on the heels of the eye-glazer that was Oryx and Crake, that's something. Atwood fans are well advised to explore this most unusual work.

In The Penelopiad, Atwood gives us a Penelope in her own words, spoken from beyond the grave. A second narrative stream comes from 12 of Penelope's maids who were slaughtered by our heroine's long-thought-dead-but-really-just-wayward husband. The maids weren't the only ones to feel Odysseus's wrath. A dogged pack of would-be suitors hoping to cash in on Penelope's wealth and status also perish in an orgy of violence triggered by Odysseus's surprise return to ancient Ithaca 20 years after he left to fight the Trojan War, a tale that might sound confusing but not in Atwood's telling. Yet what drives The Penelopiad isn't so much the yarn itself but Atwood/Penelope's dryly delivered insights into the wider human condition vis-à-vis her infamous cousin Helen of Troy, her odious mother-in-law Anticleia, and her brooding (read, quintessentially teenaged) son, Telemachus: "By 'the women,' he meant me. How could [Telemachus] refer to his own mother as 'the women'? What could I do but burst into tears? I then made the Is-this-all-the-thanks-I-get, you-have-no-idea-what-I've-been-through-for-your-sake... I-might-as-well-kill-myself speech. But I'm afraid he'd heard it before, and showed by his folded arms and rolled-up eyes that he was irritated by it, and was waiting for me to finish." Sound familiar? Many such choice nuggets are sprinkled throughout this slender book and while readers may not walk away from The Penelopiad with a richer understanding of Greek mythology (despite Atwood/Penelope's frequent attempts to correct rumors and historical inconsistencies), they will depart with a wry smile. --Kim Hughes

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, things trip along at an alarmingly brisk rate. We might easily be convinced by all the movies, T-shirts and general hoopla engendered by Ovid’s tales that the story of Icarus, say, would outweigh a Victorian novel. But no. Ovid spends about two pages relating how the son of Daedalus fell. It’s an easy enough feat when you have phrases like this in your arsenal: “So then to unimagined arts / He set his mind and altered nature’s laws.”
Atwood is no Ovid. She refuses the universal humanism of those dusty (or dusted) fables. But something in their succinctness, in their breathtaking economy, does attract her. In two new books, The Penelopiad and The Tent, Atwood has given us a veritable treatise on the clout of pursed lips. We sense her wry, dry voice (so famous now) in every page. Both books are thin as the bitter smile (or a smirk) she must have worn while penning them.
If that seems to call up the image of the author more than is proper when assessing a text, it’s a consequence Atwood herself enjoys dallying with. In one of the more delicious moments of The Tent, a micro-sized piece called “Encouraging the Young” (how pert a title!), Atwood describes how canonized authors (like herself) exist somehow outside of the anxieties and excitements that buffet young writers.

“I scuttle from bush to bush, at the edge of the dark woods, peering out. Yoo hoo! Young! Over here! I call, beckoning with my increasingly knobbly forefinger. That’s it! Now, here’s a lavish gingerbread house, decorated with your name in lights.”

This is Atwood’s portrait of the aged, esteemed, author-beyond competition, and, therefore, out of the running in a sad way. A witch in the woods. The story is two pages long, the length of a fable or myth.
The first time I came across Atwood’s appreciation for miniature myth-telling was in a collection of revisionist takes on Ovid, edited by Philip Terry, called Ovid Metamorphosed. Near the rear of the volume is a story by Atwood called “The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions”. It is the tale of Sibyl and Apollo, told from the perspective of the immortal Sibyl, now living in the modern age. Sibyl is cantankerous. She is wise. She has seen it all, and attempts to tell it, but she despairs as to whether her message is properly received. Is she also speaking for Atwood?
When Sibyl is describing her coupling with the god Apollo, Atwood has her say: “Finally we got it down to a straight offer: nooky for him, immortality and the inside track for me.” The line is jarring, in the best possible way. It also hints at the Faustian deal all authors make: immortal fame for a little bit of the soul, the identity.
That street-wise tone, which so enlivens Sibyl’s voice in “The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions”, is very much present in The Penelopiad, Atwood’s retelling of the story of Odysseus from the perspective of tired, faithful Penelope. Asphodel, the immortal flower that grows in the fields of Elysium, features in this story too-a stubborn bit of lore, perhaps, lodged in the author’s vision of the ancient world.
The Penelopiad is vintage Atwood-feminist, bittersweet, melancholic. It was created as part of the Myths Series, a project Knopf begun. (Many top authors are engaged by the series, including Jeanette Winterson, Chinua Achebe and A.S. Byatt). Atwood has fewer than 200 pages here, to alter her reader’s vision of Odysseus (a bit of a jerk, it turns out) and Penelope (not so dull a house-wife after all). Yet she doesn’t seem in any rush. There is a wandering to Penelope’s story-telling attitude that belies the brevity of Atwood’s structure. “Where was I? Oh yes,” mumbles our narrator-as though she were a hard-nosed crone, crouched over her kitchen table and looking into her tea. We learn, as if by accident, what transpired on the home front as Odysseus spent all those years adventuring. The trials of Penelope, who is “handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat,” and those of her twelve handmaids (whom Odysseus hangs upon his blockish return), are laid out by a conversational means. Atwood might be combining the sweeping economy of epic authors like Ovid and Homer with the more intimate ticks of daily conversation in order to make a point: the everyday is epic too. Not only heroes have lives worth recounting.
Michael Harris (Books in Canada)