WEIGHT
by Jeanette Winterson
Canongate £12 pp151

There are critics who consider the Odyssey a sexually egalitarian work. There are even those who believe its author may have been female. Certainly, when set against the bloody clangour of the Iliad, the story of Odysseus wending his way home to Penelope looks comparatively woman-friendly. But there’s an incident that is hard to bring into line with such a reading. On returning to find his palace full of rival males intent on wasting his wealth and marrying his wife, Odysseus slaughters the lot. There’s worse to come. Some of the women have been having sex with the predatory “suitors”. Odysseus slings his ship’s hawser from the palace roof and on it he hangs 12 of the women. “For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.”

This atrocious image is the starting point for Margaret Atwood’s scintillating variation on Homer’s story. Her narrator is Penelope, speaking to us from the underworld, but in a bracingly vital and this-worldly tone. “A certain amount of vapid dancing goes on” in the fields of asphodel, she reports, but it’s no compensation for the monotony of the entertainment and the vegetation: “Would a sprinkling of crocuses have been too much to expect?”

Penelope’s narrative is punctuated by interjections from the hanged maids. A skipping rhyme, a bawdy ballad, a burlesque, a mini court-room drama, a parody of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, even a lecture in paleoanthropology, these choric interludes are wittily conceived and adroitly executed, their formal ingenuity a reminder that Atwood, always the most stylish of novelists, was a poet first. They also serve to open out the story. Atwood’s Penelope has learnt self-sufficiency the hard way. Her mother, a naiad, was as cold and mutable as water, her father tried to drown her when she was a child. Atwood makes her guarded, careful of her privacy, and has her speak in sardonic, no-nonsense prose. The tension between her intelligent disenchantment and the maids’ playful, painful, lascivious poetry gives this book a thrilling and persistent resonance.

Penelope’s emotions and relationships are commonplace ones. She is envious of Helen of Troy (instantly recognisable as one of the hateful beauties that stalk Atwood’s fiction, stealing other women’s men). She has problems with her mother-in-law. She rails at her son, and is clever enough to know that she is making a fool of herself in doing so. She doesn’t trust her servants. But this shrewd person with a robust line in self-deprecating wisecracks is also the heroine of a myth, a story full of complication and danger and rich enough in ambiguity to provide plenty of scope for polemical reinterpretation. In this exquisitely poised book, Atwood blends intimate humour with a finely tempered outrage at the terrible injustice done to the maids, phrasing both in language as potent as a curse.

The book is to be one of a series in which contemporary writers reinterpret classical myths, published in (to judge by this pair) beautifully produced hardbacks. Jeanette Winterson’s contribution revolves around the story of Atlas, who rebelled against the upstart Olympian gods and was sentenced to bear the world on his back.

Despite a throat-clearing introduction in which she deplores reality television and nonfiction in general as having usurped “the space where imagination used to sit”, her book is more essay than fiction. Inspired by a titan, she begins appropriately on a titanic scale, writing about the heavens and the earth, and astronomy and geology, and bringing her musings home to the human scale by pointing out that the millions of potassium atoms contained in each of us were created by an exploding supernova — “Your first parent was a star.” Leaving the reader no time to wonder what this thought has to do with Atlas, she is soon reeling off a string of puns, aphorisms and sententious sayings — some dazzling, some highfalutin hokum — before arriving at her story.

Her Atlas is a gardener, gentle and sweet-natured. Heracles, who tricks him, is a caricature of proletarian masculinity, a rampant sex machine who calls everyone “mate”. Their story, told with brio and plenty of jokes, is braided with reflections on choice and fate, on responsibility and freedom, on boundaries and desires. There are also some passages in which someone calling herself “I” (Winterson has warned us against assuming it’s her) reflects on her childhood and the burden of selfhood. Finally, a dog fired into space in a Soviet sputnik in 1957 brings on a happy ending suggesting that all you need is love, a surprisingly conventional conclusion for such an oddly formed and wayward-minded book.

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