Reviews
I received a free advance copy of this novel in return for an honest, unbiased review. I had high hopes for this work. I haven't read and Tóibín but I have heard good things and I have an endless fascination with retellings of ancient myths and folk tales but I was sadly disappointed. The story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra has everything you would expect from a Greek myth: war, death, murder, kidnapping, betrayals, affairs and Clytemnestra has long been vilified as one of the bad women of literature, making her a prime candidate for a modern rehabilitation or at least a more nuanced portrayal. I suppose Tóibín does this, at least he allows her to be a betrayed, grieving mother rather than simply a power-hungry, devious harpy. Unfortunately she, and the rest of her doomed family remain totally untouchable, kept at an infuriating distance from the reader by a constant chilly, detached tone. For all the professions and dramatic acts of love, hatred, and wrath I simply couldn't feel these emotions in the characters or any emotion for them. Descriptive elements are almost totally lacking; characters, settings, feelings all absent or just barely sketched out. When coupled with prose that is dull and rather workmanlike and a lack of decent dialogue we are left with a dry lifeless narrative. Who would have thought that such a terribly blood-soaked could be dreadfully dull? If you have a penchant for insightfully told myths you can't do better than to skip this uninspired addition and go straight to the work of Christa Wolf who has done some sterling work on Medea and Cassandra.
Read for my Ancient Runes O.W.L 2019 (read a retelling) - I read Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary in 2015 and I still think about it four years later so I put off reading anything else by him because I had such high expectations for so long. I'm also exceptionally hard to please with greek mythology retellings because I'm a long time lover of the classics. House of Names had a lot to live up to before I read the first page. It's safe to say that Tóibín is a glorious writer whether it be elegant descriptions or simple dialogue. The novel is told from three perspectives -Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes. Clytemnestra's is clearly the supreme point of view with Electra's trailing behind and Orestes is just a wet wipe and uninteresting compared to the two women. It would've been a four star if Tóibín stuck with Clytemnestra the whole way through as the middle section faulted because of the switch. I found it to be an interesting interpretation on Aeschylus's The Curse of the House of Atreus and I highly recommend you read the original text if you enjoyed this or not.
