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Greek myths have fascinated people for millenia, seeing in them lessons about fate and hubris and the contingency of existence. Mark Haddon digs into the heart of these ancient fables and sees them anew. The dawn goddess Eos asked asks Zeus to give her lover Tithonus eternal life, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. In “The Quiet Limit of the World” Haddon imagines Tithonus’ life as he slowly ages over thousands of years, turning the cautionary tale of tempting the gods into a spellbinding meditation on witnessing death from the outside, and ultimately, how carnal love evolves into something richer and more poignant with time. In “The Mother’s Story,” Haddon takes the myth of the minotaur in his labyrinth, in which the beast is the spawn of the monstrous lust of the king’s wife Pasiphae, and turns it into a wrenching parable of maternal love for a damaged child, and the more real monstrosities of patriarchy. In “D.O.G.Z.” the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag after glimpsing the naked goddess Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about the continuum of human and animal behavior.
Other stories play with contemporary mythic tropes – genetic engineering, trying to escape the future, the viciousness of adolescent ostracism – to showcase how modern humans are subject to the same capriciousness that obsessed the Greeks. Haddon’s tales cover a vast range, from the mythic to the domestic, from ancient Greece to the present day, from stories about love to stories about cruelty, from battlefields to bed and breakfasts, from dogs in space to doors between worlds, all of them bound together by a profound sympathy and an understanding of how human beings act and think and feel when pushed to the very edge. Throughout Haddon’s supple prose showcases his astonishing powers of observation, of both the physical world and the workings of the psyche. His vision is clear-eyed, but always resolutely empathetic.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 15, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593914830
- File size: 258810 KB
- Duration: 08:59:10
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This thought-provoking audiobook is made up of short stories that reimagine Greek myths, as well as dystopian stories. All celebrate the enduring power of storytelling. An ensemble of narrators gives life to eight stories that tackle themes of family, brutality, humanity, love, identity, and mortality. Particularly compelling are "The Mother's Story," a retelling of the story of the Minotaur in the labyrinth; "My Old School," a contemporary look at the impact of bullying and its aftermath; and "The Wilderness," a dystopian look at genetic engineering. Listeners will find themselves transported by each offering, and the narration of each selection matches the emotion, pacing, and tension of the storyline. Listeners will think about this collection long after they finish. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from August 19, 2024
Haddon (The Porpoise) draws on Greek mythology and science fiction for a potent collection of stories about human foibles and desires. In “The Mother’s Story,” a woman sticks up for her Minotaur son, who, far from being a monster, is a neurodivergent boy rejected by his princely father. “D.O.G.Z” begins with a retelling of the scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where mortal Actaeon encounters goddess Diana bathing, then swerves into an account of the progeny of Ovid’s 33 dogs. “The Quiet Limit of the World” riffs on the Greek myth of Tithonus, who was made immortal by the goddess Eos, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Haddon is wickedly good at gore, as when Actaeon is eviscerated by his dogs, or when, in “My Old School,” the protagonist watches impotently as a fellow student hangs himself. He also pulls off grand lyricism from the perspectives of superhumans and immortals such as Tithonus, who, while cared for in the present day by his Jamaican nurse, laments the futility of the human condition (“Their presumption at giving themselves names when there is so little difference between this one and the next”), and critiques the results of human ingenuity—the astrolabe, the steam engine, the watch (“the most ridiculous affectation, a kind of pretended ownership of that thing over which mortals have least control”). This is divine.
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