Zachary Mason
No doubt soon enough if not already, some canny book business impresario will arrange for Annabel Lyon and Zachary Mason to go on a joint reading tour of North America, a continent whose literary readers are, apparently, voracious for classical history and literature these days.
After all, The Golden Mean, Lyon's lively and lyrical imagining of a teenage Alexander the Great's tutelage under Aristotle, was the unexpected buzz book of last fall in Canada, while Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, an eccentric and cerebral riff on the Homeric standard, enjoyed a similar run through the spring books season in the United States.
How to account for such surprising success, in an age and culture that seems, endless bad mythological movies notwithstanding, otherwise indifferent to some of its oldest and most profound sources of history and story?
The short answer is that both Lyon and Mason have each managed, to borrow a dictum of Ezra Pound's, "to make it new," to take figures and tales calcified by age and successions of prior remakes, and revealed them in fresh and arresting ways.
In terms of the literary innovations involved in such efforts, Mason's is the more ambitious, if less evenly accomplished, of the two. As we learn from its preface, The Lost Books of the Odyssey purports to be a contemporary translation of "forty-four concise variations on Odysseus's story that omit stock epic formulae in favour of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity."
The prose itself tends toward the haughty and self-involved extremes of academic prose here and throughout the collection, at its weaker moments. Its stronger moments come when Mason leaves off his fussy scholarly pose, as a translator and footnoting glossarist for the book's varied literary gestures toward ancient Greek stories. It's during such stretches that Mason's sinewy and bold prose wonderfully explores the thoughts and doings of a host of characters, Odysseus principal among them, familiar to us by way of Homer (and Tennyson, Joyce and Walcott, among others).
These are, in Mason's handling, flawed and vaunting men and women who, whether at war, at home or sailing across a wine-dark sea from one shore to the other, "become restless, mercurial," and inspire Mason to 44 Borges-like takes on their schemes, worries, and adventures.
Smartly choosing the ending of The Odyssey, the hero's long-delayed homecoming, as his point of departure, Mason places Odysseus in a series of subsequent situations and guises. "Giddy" with unexpected fresh prospects at the end of the collection's first tale, "Odysseus turns and flees" home in search of new adventures.
The results: Sometimes, Odysseus is not the inexhaustible and brave warrior we'd expect, but a clever, even conniving storyteller. Elsewhere, he's a tired celebrity who only wants a simple life made impossible by public demands, court intrigues, domestic tensions and the very fame of his achievements in the world beyond Ithaca, achievements that he himself has grown indifferent to, if not embarrassed of depending upon to pass the time with his wife: "I tell Penelope about the war and my many exploits," he explains, near the end of the collection's 11th fragment, "already feeling myself becoming a bore whose only conversation is of battles long past."
When Mason puts his main character in the midst of such experiences, however, particularly when he's encountering his most famous antagonists, figures like Circe and Calypso, the Sirens and the Cyclops, Odysseus is endowed with an engaging, rough-hewn thoughtfulness. Strapped to the mast, listening the Sirens, he tells us, "I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons I had just crushed into wax, and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack."
No writer will ever definitively crack the codes of the world's oldest and greatest stories, which is only cause for joy when a writer like Mason so finely and eccentrically makes something new of them in the meantime.
Randy Boyagoda is a professor of literature at Ryerson University and author of Governor of the Northern Province, a novel.