Did Homer’s heroes need therapy? What Nolan and Yann Martel get wrong about epics

As he translates and puts together this ‘Psoad’, episodes of his own life are revealed, a common man chronicling another commoner, the epic and the everyday unspooling together to reveal heroism and heartbreak, courage and cowardice.

When Psoas joined the war, his motivation was simple: “to take from the rich Trojans, what a dream”. War, he soon discovers, is not a dream. Psoas and his fellow men fight and bleed and die, alongside but in a different universe from the phalanx of Agamemnon, Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus, Hector, and the other majestic warriors.

Martel’s work is a nerd’s delight, as the familiar heroes make an appearance, reflected through a very different lens. Agamemnon is a bully and thug. Achilles is golden and heroic, sure, but he does have armour and weapons custom-made for him by gods. Odysseus is the clever king of Ithaca, in command, his wits about him, “clever then, clever now, clever always”, a thief of ideas, but then “theft is a king’s right”. Martel mentions Odysseus in just a few lines, but his characterisation is more faithful to Homer than Nolan’s moping strongman.

The Psoad has many great moments, that genuinely make you stop and re-read and smile as the familiar classic shines in new shades and new ways. If only Martel had stuck to the Greek bits.

The novelist, however, decides to also tell us all about the unprepossessing Harlow Donne, and Harlow Donne tries clumsy moralising, linking the Trojan war to his own life and to the very founding blocks of the Christian moral universe.

At some point in Donne’s life, as he tries to finish his PhD and win back his increasingly irritated wife and reach out to the daughter he left behind for the Oxford adventure, you get the sense that he won’t make it, he just doesn’t have it in him. Towards the end of the book, you get the same sinking feeling about Martel’s parallel-drawing and sermon-plying. At one point, Psoas takes a dead child to Hades, and the God of Death is so overcome he wishes to die. Martel somehow traces a line from this to Jesus Christ, the God who did die.

The grand and the grubby

Homer remains relevant today because his epics — like our own Ramayana and Mahabharata — have scale. They are soaring and flamboyant and unapologetic. The ancient epics don’t shy away from the reality that one grand story is made up of a thousand sacrifices and compromises, that life is complex and defies neat resolutions.

Nolan and Martel, however, are products of our times, with our obsessive focus on the individual, our endless examinations of one person’s motives and influences, our determined quest to rationalise things. Both The Odyssey and Son of Nobody shine when they stick to the epic, reflecting its vigour and vitality and momentum.

Both flag when they try to adapt Homer to modern realities, using war as a parallel to divorce, or narrowing the grand, shape-shifting Odysseus into a soldier suffering PTSD.

Son of Nobody has many rewarding moments, read it despite the self-pitying Donne. And then maybe go back to Homer, the poet who launched a thousand flicks.

See you next month,

Yours Literary,

Yashee

yashee.s@indianexpress.com

P.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.