House of Odysseus - Claire North

[troisoiseaux]

It turns out that Claire North's Ithaca was not a stand-alone, as I'd assumed, but the first book in a trilogy retelling both the Odyssey and the Oresteia! In House of Odysseus, she once again knocks it out of the park with a genuinely creative, compelling reimagining: after Penelope agrees to harbor a Furies-haunted, apparently mad Orestes, Menelaus rolls up with an army of Spartans (and Helen in tow) and takes over with a smile and a how thoughtless of me, to have left my brother-in-arms' wife to fend for herself for so long! Add to this two mysteries (a murder at the palace; the apparent poisoning of Orestes), the handful of original characters introduced in the first book, and the goddesses of Olympus as interested parties— but it's a tightly-woven story, even with all of these moving parts. North is very, very good at telling you a lot about a character— even (or especially?) minor ones— in a sentence or two, and I love her Elektra so, so much: a deeply broken, angry girl holding the pieces of herself together with sheer spite.

Very minor complaint: one of my favorite things about Ithaca is that its narrator is Hera, but this one is narrated by Aphrodite, and I found the resulting change in narrative tone... somewhat grating? There were some eye-roll-including sex-related metaphors ("an island dribbled into the sea like the last liquids of an unsatisfactory encounter with a premature lover") and a certain, jarring slanginess ("the naiad who bore Penelope and thrust her into her father's arms with a merry cry of 'She's yours, byeeeee!'"). (Actually, I can't remember if everyone sounded as modern, dialogue-wise, in the first book as they did in this one— but they might have? The non-dialogue narrative tone was definitely more slang-y, though.) On the other hand, given the pattern, I'd bet that the narrator of the third book will be Athena, and I'm so excited for that: Athena POV as her pet liar returns and commits atrocities (i.e., killing Penelope's maids, who— if not major characters in this series— North has spent two books identifying as individuals with personalities and hopes and dreams)?? (And what about the Egyptian suitor who has become Penelope's trusted ally??)

Comments

[lunabee34]

I'm not reading this because this sounds amazing and I want to read this book!

[troisoiseaux]

Yessssss!

[chestnut_pod]

Was the prior novel also playing a high-low or ancient-modern kind of rhetorical game wrt dialogue and so on?

[troisoiseaux]

Having double-checked against a sample of Ithaca: the dialogue does sound distinctly modern, and I'd describe the narrative tone as "wry," but I think it's less... casual?... than either the narrative tone of House of Odysseus or the dialogue of either.

[chestnut_pod]

Interesting, thanks!