As they fade from the earth, the gods do not hover over with their haunting, whistling sound. I notice it here, the silence around death. They have departed, the ones who oversaw death. They have gone and they will not be back. [loc. 99]
Based on, but not exactly a retelling of, the Oresteia. Tóibín depicts a world without gods or furies, in which 'what you did is all you have'. The novel is in three parts, with three narrators -- Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra -- and tells the story of Iphigenia's sacrifice, the murder of Agamemnon, and the vengeance wreaked by his children. Clytemnestra's first-person narrative was, for me, the most effective: her fear and misery as she's imprisoned under a rock for three days, her sense that the time of the gods have passed and that Agamemnon alone is to blame for the murder of their daughter, her sheer icy rage. Orestes' story, told in the third person, is oddly flat. He is taken from the city for 'protection', imprisoned in a strict house with other boys, and escapes with his friend Leander to live idyllically by the sea. Only when he returns to the palace, and to his mother, does it seem that he has any agency. And Electra, whose story is also told in the third person, seems one-dimensional.
There is some beautiful writing here, and some achingly painful depictions of grief, bitterness and rage. It matters that the time of the gods has passed, and that the characters must take responsibility for their own actions. But the novel feels claustrophobic, unanchored. There is no mention of Troy, and little description of the locations through which the characters move. I was thrown by several seeming anachronisms -- for example, people wear nightclothes, drink from glasses, herd sheep -- and though the absence of gods and furies drove the story, there did not seem to be anything in their place.
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