Book Review: "House of Names"
Colm Tóibín's novel demythologizes the towering figures of the House of Atreus.
Some stories loom large in the collective western imagination, and arguably the Trojan War and its aftermath is one such collection of tales. Who could ever forget the tragedy that befell the house of Atreus, when the returning warrior king Agamemnon was slain in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra, who sought revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia? For that matter, who could forget the tale of revenge that followed that murder, as Clytemnestra’s surviving children, Electra and Orestes, sought to bring her down, to murder her as she had murdered their father?
It’s a gutsy move to try to retell the most iconic legends and myths of antiquity, to breathe new life into these millennia-old stories, but that’s exactly what Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s novel, House of Names, manages to accomplish. Told from the alternating points of view of Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra, it’s a novel that brings the grand figures of the ancient tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides down to earth, allowing modern readers to see them in all of their flawed, pedestrian humanity.
Like many other readers and reviewers, I found myself especially drawn to Clytemnestra. Her parts of the novel are conveyed via first person, and this grants them an immediacy and an emotional heft that allows us to see her as she would like to be seen: as a mother devastated by her husband’s betrayal and slaughter of their child; as a queen trying to take control of a country and a court that disrespects her; and as a shade haunting the halls of the palace that was once her own. Given the horrors that she endures, it’s no wonder that she eventually sees murder as the only option, the only way that she can assuage her burning rage at her husband’s betrayal.
For her part, Electra is a bit of an enigma. She doesn’t get nearly as much page time as either her brother or her mother, but the fact that her story is told in first person gives it a similar immediacy to Clytemnestra’s portion. Because her mother has refused to treat her as an equal or to involve her in the running of the country, she’s allowed to develop her own ideas about her father, and this leads her to ultimately conclude that her mother must suffer the same fate as Agamemnon, and she ultimately brings Orestes in on her designs. Ultimately, of course, she’s really no different from Clytemnestra, as her brother often reflects. Once she has power, she makes sure that she sidelines him, just as her mother did when she sat on the throne.
For his part, Orestes’ tale is told in third-person, so we’re not quite as emotionally invested in his travails, as he’s first sent out of the city (allegedly for his protection) and then spends several years in exile, living with an old woman and two of his fellow escaped prisoners. Though he ultimately slays his mother in revenge for his father, it’s made abundantly clear that he has little control of his own destiny or his actions. He is always at the mercy of those who have more information than he does, whether that’s his sister, his mother, or his friend and lover Leander. He’s something of an innocent--he thinks that he’s impregnated Leander’s sister, Ianthe, even though they’ve never had sex--which makes his eventual murder of his mother even more shocking. Unfortunately for him, that act, one of the most famous in Greek tragedy, doesn’t give him release or allow him to take a greater role in affairs of state. If anything, it renders him even more impotent, and it’s his increasing diminishment that is one of the most tragic aspects of his story.
What makes House of Names such a searing and troubling novel is its refusal to include the more familiar aspects of the myth. There are only passing allusions to the “wars” being fought abroad, and we don’t get the sense that Agamemnon has gone off to fight the grand conflict that is our current conception of the Trojan War. The gods, likewise, are nowhere to be found, and it’s clear that the characters don’t believe that they exist anymore, that their influence on the world of mortals has waned. It is, thus, a very dangerous and bleak sort of world that these men and women inhabit, one in which men like Aegisthus can rise to power through their ability to manipulate others and take advantage of power vacuums. There are a few gestures toward the grand mythology with which we are all familiar, but for the most part we’re firmly grounded in the human world, for better or for worse.
There’s a sparseness to Tóibín’s prose that might be to everyone’s liking, but it feels appropriate to the subject matter and for the world that he seeks to create. This is a harsh environment, and the most detailed descriptions tend to be those that focus on the most brutal acts: the slaughter of animals for sacrifice; the murders of Agamemnon and others; the bodies that lie strewn behind the characters and their quest for power and agency. It makes for uneasy reading at times, but that’s precisely the point. This is a family torn apart by its own dramas and its own internal rot, and we’re not permitted to look away. We must bear witness to their gradual dissolution and descent into bloodshed and darkness.
House of Names, like so many of the other mythological retellings that have emerged in the last ten years or so, shows us that there are still aspects of these stories that resonate with us today. In stripping away the grandiosity of myth and the trappings of Greek tragedy to focus on the dynamics of the family, Tóibín’s novel allows us to see these characters as real people, all of whom are drawn into a largely meaningless spiral of death and violence and revenge. This is truly a tale for our turbulent and troubled present.