I’d never prayed for anything to any god: I made sacrifices in the way I paid taxes. Gods are like queens. You pay what you owe and in return they don’t notice you. [loc. 992]
Phaidros is about thirty years old, a veteran of the Trojan War, and a Theban knight. He's mourning his commander Helios, whose twin sister Agave is the Queen of Thebes: he's haunted by memories, and convinced that he's been cursed -- by a lost prince, or by a blue-eyed boy who might have been a god. And then a star crashes down into the parade ground, and Phaidros sees footsteps in the molten glass of its crater.
This is a very different novel to the current plethora of myths retold. Some of the characters, and some of the plot, are familiar from Euripides' Bacchae: other aspects of the story are new, and often just as unsettling. The Hymn to Dionysus is also quite different from Natasha Pulley's previous novels, though there are echoes of those earlier works throughout: turns of phrase, golden pears, hair-combing, games with language -- Helios, like Odysseus, is 'polytropos', a complicated man* -- and sparks of sheer fun, such as diplomacy pomegranates and surprise badgers.
Thebes is a city in crisis, drought-starved and heaving with unrest. It's a military state, with a constant refrain of 'obedience is strength' and 'duty is honour'. In battle, the front lines are built out of pairs of sworn lovers like Helios and Phaidros, a commander and their ward: usually there's only a five-year age gap. (Nearly half the knights, it should be noted, are girls and women.) 'The best compliment you can pay someone here,' Phaidros explains, 'is to say, you’re a marvel; as in a clockwork marvel. It means you function the same no matter what’s happening.'
The marvels -- bronze statues animated by clockwork -- are one of the stranger aspects of the story. When the star crashes into the parade ground, things become even stranger. A kind of madness, expressed in song, has infected many of the knights. The people of Thebes talk about a curse incurred by the burning of Troy, and whisper that a lost prince will return and seek vengeance -- not Agave's missing son Pentheus, but the son of her dead sister Semele. And Phaidros, sent in search of Pentheus, seeks out a witch ...
I have not mentioned Dionysus, whose 'function is to guard the border between the clockwork and the wild.' [loc. 2450] He's uncanny, vulnerable, ancient, amused: he is not, despite modern depictions, a god for good times. Masks, marvels, mazes and madness...
I am still in the process of reading, rereading and thinking about this novel. Do I love it as much as The Mars House? as The Kingdoms? Will I always notice the occasional typos, or wonder about the triplet slaves and the mechanical Furies, or wish a happy ending for a woman? (The original myth dooms Agave, but she may be Pulley's most rounded, relateable and likeable female character.) I can't yet say. But it is a glorious and uplifting read, and one that has lured me back towards the best, or my favourite, novels of Ancient Greece.
I was unsurprised that the author, in her Notes, mentioned 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed, by Eric Cline...
... nothing is left but those scraps of tax records ... noted down on clay that baked in those fires. [loc. 6670]* See also 'Catharsis, Harpies, Harmatia, and More: Natasha Pulley on Her Favorite Greek Words'
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