Tag: Natalie Haynes

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

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It’s always good to come across a Greek mythology retelling that has nothing to do with the Trojan War! There have been so many over the last few years (Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships being one of the best I’ve read) that it makes a refreshing change to read about other characters and other myths.

Stone Blind is subtitled Medusa’s Story but is actually written from the perspectives of many different characters, all coming together to tell the tale of the Gorgon Medusa and Perseus’ quest to capture her head. In traditional accounts of this myth, Perseus is seen as the hero, bravely slaying the monstrous snake-haired Medusa whose eyes can turn living creatures to stone. This version looks at things from a different angle, questioning whether it’s really fair to refer to Medusa as a monster and painting Perseus as, if not exactly a villain, a thoughtless, dim-witted boy who ends up completing his quest almost by accident.

While part of the story is told from Medusa’s point of view, we also hear the voices of many other gods, mortals and mythical beings including the other two Gorgons, their sisters the Graia, who share one eye and one tooth between them, the Ethiopian princess Andromeda, who is chained to a rock as a sacrifice, and even the olive trees of Athens. Some have a lot to say, others appear only for a few pages, but each one has an important contribution to make. This is the same style Natalie Haynes used in A Thousand Ships, but I found it more effective here. Whereas in the previous book the various characters’ narratives felt as though they were appearing in a random order, almost like a collection of separate short stories, here they are ordered in a way that makes chronological sense, with each new voice helping to move the story forward.

Medusa, as she is portrayed here, is a very sympathetic character. The only mortal Gorgon of the three and therefore the most vulnerable, she is raised by her two older sisters, Sthenno and Euryale. Medusa’s monstrous features only appear after she is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple and the angry goddess punishes her by transforming her hair into a seething mass of snakes and cursing her with the ability to turn everything around her to stone. Condemned to a life of blindness, afraid to uncover her eyes in case her gaze should fall upon one of her beloved sisters, Medusa’s story is very sad – and we know that it is only going to get worse because, far away, Polydectes, King of Seriphos, has challenged Perseus to bring him the severed head of a Gorgon. Fortunately, Haynes doesn’t dwell on the Gorgon-slaying episode, moving straight on with other parts of the myth.

Despite the tragic elements of the plot, the story is told with plenty of humour, particularly in the scenes dealing with the petty squabbling of Zeus, Hera, Athena, Hermes and the other Olympian gods. Haynes does an excellent job of capturing their fickle, petulant natures and the childish rivalries between them. In fact, I can’t really say anything negative about this book, other than that the title is slightly misleading as this is so much more than just Medusa’s story. I’m looking forward to future books by Natalie Haynes and must also go back and read her earlier novel, The Children of Jocasta.

Have you read any other retellings of this myth? If so, I would be interested in any recommendations.

Thanks to Mantle for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

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“Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?”

This is the book I had expected Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls to be. A retelling of the events surrounding the Trojan War written from the perspective of not just one or two but many of the women who had a role to play in the war and its aftermath – and going beyond the Iliad, the Aeneid and the Oresteia to tell the stories the men didn’t tell.

From Penthesilea, the Amazon queen, to Cassandra the prophet; from Thetis, the sea nymph and mother of Achilles, to Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth; from Iphigenia, cruelly sacrificed on what should have been her wedding day, to Creusa, who wakes in the night to find the city of Troy in flames – just think of a woman from Greek mythology and she is probably here, in this book!

The stories of some of the women are told quite briefly, while others are given more time and attention; some appear only once but others recur again and again throughout the novel. Interspersed between these stories are a series of letters from Penelope to her absent husband, Odysseus, the tone growing increasingly hurt and frustrated as tales of his heroic escapades begin to reach her while the man himself appears to be in no hurry to return home to his wife. And holding all the other threads of the novel together are short sections of commentary by Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, who is providing guidance to a blind poet who wants to tell the story of Troy:

Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.

This is an ambitious novel but, for me, it mostly works. I say mostly because there were times when I found the structure confusing – the stories are not presented in chronological order and jump around in time so that a chapter set after the fall of Troy is followed by a chapter set at the beginning of the war – but I’m happy to admit that I am in no way an expert on Greek mythology and readers with more knowledge probably wouldn’t have a problem. I’m not really sure of the reason for the non-linear structure, though – obviously the stories must have been carefully arranged in a certain order but to me they felt very random. Also, because there are so many different narrators, many of whom made their voices heard only for a few pages before disappearing from the novel completely, it was difficult to form any kind of emotional connection with them. Still, there are some I found more memorable than others: Cassandra, doomed to constantly ‘watch the shock on people’s faces, when precisely what she had predicted – and they had ignored – came true’; Hera, Athene and Aphrodite fighting over the golden apple inscribed with the words ‘For the most beautiful’; and the sad story of Laodamia, devoted to a bronze statue of her lost husband.

Although A Thousand Ships felt more like a collection of short stories than a novel, I enjoyed reading it and am now wondering whether I should try Natalie Haynes’ previous Greek retelling, The Children of Jocasta.

Thanks to Mantle for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.