Early literary epics, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, often served as boosterism in disguise – of monarchs, dynasties, nations. The Iliad, Homer’s poem about the Trojan War, and the earliest surviving work of Greek literature (and arguably the first bestseller), is a notable exception: It makes the Greeks look terrible.
It was that irony that made Yann Martel think it would make excellent fodder for a novel. “It’s all about these dyspeptic, stupid, foolish men. These Harvey Weinsteins of 3,000 years ago who are really bumbling morons who cannot get over their anger, at tremendous cost to them,” he told me in an interview.
The novel that forged Martel’s reputation, I surely don’t need to tell you, is Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize in 2002, lodged itself on bestseller lists around the planet and sold 15 million copies worldwide. It has even assumed a place on standard British high-school curricula, next to stalwarts such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Next came the Oscar-nominated Hollywood film and a stage play that toured the U.K. and North America (including Toronto) until last year, winning a spate of British theatre and Tony awards.
Martel’s novel Life of Pi has been adapted for the stage and the big screen.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
It all made Martel, now 62, a wealthy man – wealthy enough, at least, that he can dedicate himself full-time to writing. He does so in a modest 12-by-10-foot studio at the back of the Saskatoon home where he’s lived with the writer Alice Kuipers since 2003. Martel is also an active parent to the couple’s four children, who range in age from 10 to 16. His life appears to agree with him. Other than a greyer head of hair, Martel looks much the same as he did during the Pi heyday.
Martel was born in Spain and for years lived a globally peripatetic life with his French-Canadian parents (French is his first language). As a child, he devoured retellings of Greek myths by authors such as Roger Lancelyn Green and Edith Hamilton, but never got around to reading the source material. When he finally did, it was at the urging of Kuipers.
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His expectation, that The Iliad would be “a venerable, dusty, vaguely boring monument,” was immediately turned on its head. He loved it. He also read The Odyssey, but found its happy ending more of “a bourgeois thing.” In popular culture, The Odyssey has gotten far more attention than The Iliad (from films such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation, to the video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey).
The offspring of that inspiration was Martel’s new novel, Son of Nobody. It follows a Canadian academic, Harlow Donne, who discovers in the bowels of Oxford’s Bodleian Library a lost account of the war told by a battle-worn Greek commoner, Psoas of Midea, who, in a shocking act of lèse-majesté, takes on a Trojan prince in hand-to-hand combat.
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Something that struck Martel in his Iliad reading was that the grand-sounding Trojan War was in fact less a war than a siege. For one, there was no clear victor. The event (which may or may not have actually occurred) ended with the Trojans exterminated and the Greeks devastated and weakened. Though, per legend, the war involved battles, raids, negotiations and divine meddling, it’s mostly about waiting. Ten years, to be precise. The Iliad only covers the final year of that decade.
Martel found all that waiting, and its attendant anxiety, compelling and distinctly modern. “Because we’re always waiting. For Godot. We’re waiting for her flight, we’re waiting to see the doctor, we’re waiting for a green light, we’re waiting, waiting, waiting. And that feeling of disempowerment in the face of something monumental is a kind of angst we still very much live with today.”
Formatted in the manner of an annotated scholarly paper, the novel’s pages are divided horizontally by a thin line. The upper part consists of the “Psoad,” the name with which Donne christens the epic. The bottom part gives us footnotes to the latter. Imagine Arthur Phillips’s The Tragedy of Arthur, or Nabokov’s Pale Fire (neither of which Martel had read prior to writing the novel), as told by Howard Zinn.
While the footnotes often serve as a handy aid for those not well acquainted with Homer or The Iliad, others digress from the source material. In these, Donne recounts the collapse of his marriage to his wife, Gail, or directly addresses his young daughter, Helen; both having remained in Canada during his year at Oxford. The relationship between verse fragments and these footnotes isn’t always apparent. Figuring out the connections, Martel hopes, will be a gratifying task for readers with the patience to puzzle them out.
Son of Nobody follows Canadian academic Harlow Donne, who discovers a lost account of the Trojan War in the bowels of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.Christopher John/Bodleian Libraries/Supplied
For his research, Martel travelled to some of Greece’s legendary places, including Troy (“a dump of a site”), Mycenae (Agamemnon’s stomping ground) and Midea. He wasn’t there to burrow through archives, but to absorb the atmosphere of the place; to breathe in the elements so prominent in Greek myth: the sunlight, the wind, the Aegean Sea.
He also read several Iliad translations. His favourite was the first one he picked up, by Stephen Mitchell, whose translation of the Bhagavad Gita he had read and admired. (A strong runner-up was Emily Wilson’s more recent version.) He sampled Richmond Lattimore’s more faithful academic rendering, too, but found it stuffy and deadening. Had he started with Lattimore, he says, he would never have written Son of Nobody.
Martel in Regent’s Park, central London in March 2026.Ayesha Kazim/The Globe and Mail
Several modern Homeric translators use free verse. Martel’s in the Psoad is freer still – though it doesn’t entirely roam unsupervised, each line being confined to 10 to 12 syllables. The verse is clear and direct, with occasional Homeric flourishes (“Thersites opened his swollen eyelids/ like slugs parting company”) and colloquial jolts (at one point Prince Mestor refers to Helen as “hot” and “a good catch”).
Once he found his stride, Martel found the writing flowed naturally, despite the fact that he’d never written poetry before. “At one point as an artist, you just close your eyes and you are that person. You have it in their body and you sort of start imagining what it was like. And having read The Iliad several times, you kind of get into the rhythm of it.”
He chose the name “Psoas” for his character because it “sounded Greek.” It is Greek, but not commonly used as a person’s name. Rather, it’s an obscure muscle found deep in the loins. As we chat, Martel googles “psoas” to double-check the definition. He tells me that it’s the psoas’s pairing with another muscle, the iliacus, that allows us to bend our thighs, or, say, lift a spear and charge some battlements.
I tell Martel I appreciate his planting of the psoas–iliacus connection as a kind of Easter egg. He leans back, looking slightly gobsmacked. “I actually didn’t notice that. Of course the iliac is the Iliad.”
Life of Pi turns 25 this year, so I ask him about his relationship with that novel. “I’m still delighted. I’m still grateful that it sells. I’m still grateful to have won the Booker. I’m still grateful for the letters that I get. Art is a social contract. You create and you offer to the world and you hope your gift is taken. And when it is, it’s very validating. It’s very satisfying.”
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He puts some of that literary triumph down to simple luck. Published in 2001, the novel’s idiosyncratic preoccupations with philosophy (Martel’s subject at university), animals and religion seemed to offer a needed antidote to the pervasive trauma and violence associated with 9/11 and its aftermath. Martel assumed no one would read it. In a 2008 interview he said that his hope for Life of Pi had been that it would become a cult classic. Instead, it became a classic, straight up.
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His first two post-Pi novels went to some difficult places: the Holocaust (Beatrice and Virgil) and humanity’s struggle with grief and meaning (The High Mountains of Portugal). That those novels didn’t come close to Pi’s “freak success” doesn’t bother Martel in the slightest. He thinks wishing for such a thing would be vain. “I’m not going to emulate that, and nor do I want to. When you give someone something, you let it go. So I let go of Life of Pi long ago, and I follow my muse.”
Publishers haven’t always warmed to his stubbornly uncommercial choices. This includes Son of Nobody. “Do you think they were happy to have a book divided in two?” he says. They took it on regardless.
During the months while the manuscript was being reviewed, Martel took a solo trip to San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico, where he began pounding out his next project, a “book” called The Forgiven and the Forgotten. Inspired by his 85-year-old mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, it consists of a box of 52 unnumbered booklets that can be read in any order (except for the first, which contains the copyright page; he says publishers won’t budge on that).
The design is part of the point: scrambling and randomizing the book’s sequence turns the act of reading into a metaphor for the way the brain can lose memory and chronology. Exactly how the e-book and audiobook will work isn’t yet clear. He’s working on it.
To convince his publishers of the concept, Martel has made his own prototype of the box and booklets, which he proudly shows me. He knows they won’t be happy when he pitches it to them, “Hey, forget the divided page. It’s worse now.”