Supplied
- Title: Son of Nobody
- Author: Yann Martel
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Knopf Canada
- Pages: 352
At the end of the introduction to her 2023 translation of Homer’s Iliad, classicist Emily Wilson lays out the coming experience in no uncertain terms: “You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever.” She lists the typical effects of this revelation – weeping, bargaining, begging, praying – before she concludes the stark reality: “Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing.”
What does it mean to look clearly at death without blinking, flinching or euphemizing? How can an unmediated experience of that loss enrich our lives? Over more than 15,000 or so lines, depending on the translation, the Iliad allows readers to immerse themselves in those questions. It is perhaps its most moving gift.
Interview: Yann Martel puts his spin on the Trojan War in Son of Nobody
Yann Martel’s new novel, Son of Nobody, does not ask those questions. The prize-winning author’s latest is about Harlow Donne, a Homeric scholar who, based on his knowledge of Ancient Greek, is offered a scholarship to the University of Oxford to translate parts of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri – fragments of writing dating back as far as the third century BC. He accepts, leaving his frustrated wife Gail and young daughter Helen back home in Canada. While working, he discovers what appears to be a Trojan War poem about a commoner named Psoas who challenges a Trojan prince in battle. Donne calls it the Psoad.
Readers get both stories. Mimicking certain translations, the poem in Donne’s translation occupies the top half of pages. In the footnotes – which are frequently addressed directly to Helen, who loves bedtime tales – Donne explains elements of the poem, muses about (or insists upon) its connection to the New Testament, and recounts his own devastating loss and a marriage strained by neglect and lack of communication. It’s an entertaining conceit, but with attention split between an epic poem that sometimes seems a bit silly, notes about Christianity, animals, ancient and modern life, as well as an actual tragedy that feels minimized by the whole experiment, readers are left with nowhere to land emotionally.
Rough enough, but perhaps there is something more insidious going on. Donne is what British philosopher Galen Strawson calls a “narrativist” – someone who thinks life is a narrative activity. Strawson writes that, in the humanities and psychology, there is a consensus “standardly linked with the claim that such self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.”
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But he and others, including philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, aren’t buying it. “I’m inclined to agree with Sartre when he suggests in his novel La Nausée that self-storying, although inevitable, condemns us to inauthenticity, a kind of absence from our own lives,” Strawson writes in his book Things That Bother Me.
Anyone who uses social media is familiar with that absence – the way a person’s social-media persona can seem divorced from their real-life self. It can be mostly innocuous, but also damaging and alienating and usually in service of selling something. It’s not illegal or always morally reprehensible, but it is constant and its essential condition is reduction.
In Son of Nobody, Donne subjects his dire situation to the same kind of reduction. Just as the attention of the reader is split between Psoad, academic footnotes and personal memoir, one gets the sense that Donne’s attention is, as well. The novel raises a compelling but mostly unexplored question about the cost of devoting oneself to their work. A generous reading could suggest that Son of Nobody reflects grief’s tendency to fragment and blur reality, and in Donne’s footnotes we witness a man’s mind unravelling. But that’s a stretch. More likely, it seems, he’s recording his story in a self-indulgent act of penance. Spending a novel’s worth of time with a man in that mode can be a tough go.
The Psoad does pose a deceptively interesting question: What if a regular guy composed an epic poem about his time fighting in the Trojan War? Son of Nobody‘s answer seems to be that such a poem would be outfitted with progressive, morally unambiguous and potentially anachronistic takes (war is bad, the divine right of kings is bad), and might have had a significant impact on the New Testament.
Speculative flights of fancy regarding the ancient world generate a lot of excitement – they’re the reason The Da Vinci Code was a bestseller and Ancient Aliens is beloved by many. But in the bloody, pagan shadow of the Iliad, the Psoad question shifts: “What if there was a perspective on the Trojan War that was more relatable for a 21st-century reader?” It’s the kind of move that makes classicists wince. Maybe every generation gets the Iliad they deserve.
One could say it’s simply harmless storytelling. The Trojan War is fair game for any and all interpretations – the Iliad is also a fiction. But it adds little to a tradition that moves readers because it refuses to look sideways at its subject. The Iliad‘s relentless brutality demands that readers reckon with the reality of death. Son of Nobody buries that reality in a children’s story.