Son of Nobody is the new novel by Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize in 2002. It’s a double narrative about Harlow Donne, a Canadian classicist at Oxford, who works on a supposedly lost Greek epic, The Psoad.
The ancient story retells the Trojan War through Psoas, an ordinary soldier, rather than kings, heroes or gods. As Harlow pieces the fragments together, his footnotes become a second story about ambition, family breakdown and loss. Monique Verduyn spoke to Martel about myth, ambition, memory and forgotten lives.
How have your interests as a novelist changed over three decades?
Each novel I’ve written has been the result of a question. With Self (1996), my first novel, about a boy who metamorphoses, Orlando-like, into a young woman and then, seven years later, into a young man, the question was, “what does it mean to be a man; what does it mean to be a woman?” With Life of Pi (2001), “In this age of triumphant science and technology, what is this odd thing called faith?” In Beatrice and Virgil (2010), “how do we talk about the Holocaust; how do we represent monumental tragedy?” And so on. To each new question, a new novel with its own approach.
How did Son of Nobody become the book you wanted to write?
Son of Nobody was born from reading The Iliad. I grew up on Greek myths but I had never read original material. When I finally read The Iliad in Stephen Mitchell’s lean and exhilarating translation, it was not the book I expected. So much anger and despair, so little redemption. I was amazed that this was the way the ancient Greeks chose to present themselves to the world in what is literally the first book in the West.
The Iliad starts with the word mēnin, wrath or rage, and sure enough it’s a book seething with rage. How opposite, how contrary, to the other foundational story of the West, the Gospels. And both were written in Greek. In that noticing of similarities and contrasts arose my story.
Your narrator, Harlow Donne, leaves his wife and young daughter to take up a fellowship interpreting The Psoad. As his work consumes him and his family life unravels, he can seem difficult, even indifferent. How do you understand him?
As an echo of the Ancient Greeks and their mistakes. They too found their work all-consuming. Agamemnon’s anger, Achilles’ self-pity — they echo Harlow’s emotions.
And perhaps you’re being a bit hard on Harlow. He has work to do, as we all do, and, as it happens, his is particularly absorbing. Imagine you’re Howard Carter and you’ve just discovered King Tut’s tomb. Surely you’d be late for supper that evening, no?
Son of Nobody places an ordinary soldier at the centre of a story about kings, heroes and gods. It seemed the obvious point of view to take. The citizen, whether respected or not, whether living in a democracy or not, is the base unit of society. That common voice is the majority voice. It’s the one that comes naturally to me. I strongly believe in egalitarianism, that none of us is better by birth or happenstance. Luck, systemic privilege and wealth do not confer greater rights to anyone.
You’ve said the Trojan War still speaks to us because it is also a story of waiting.
The Trojan War was a siege lasting 10 years. Between violent battles, the Greeks and Trojans had nothing to do but wait, and waiting is very trying. It births resentments and wild ideas, but also questions. The Iliad is a violent but also very thoughtful work. The Ancient Greeks at Troy asked themselves questions that are still valid today about the meaning of life, the why and the what of existence.
You’ve given the poem and the footnotes equal weight on the page. Why did you choose this structure to tell the story?
I wanted both strands of narrative told on their own terms. Dividing the page in two does that. At the top you have the past, told in epic verse; at the bottom, the present, told in modern footnotes.
It works narratively but also symbolically. At one point in the book, I say, “We all live lives that are footnotes to a greater story.” Our atomic lives add up to the story of the world, our small voices merging into the choral work of history. One cannot do without the other.
And it makes, I hope, for a pleasing change of gears for the reader, a book that has a manual transmission. The reader must switch from epic verse fragments to technical footnotes: clutch, gear shift, release the clutch, press the accelerator, up and down you go along a long road until you reach your destination. This is a book that more actively asks the reader to participate in its co-creation.
The novel moves between the Trojan War and family breakdown. What did the domestic story allow you to convey, and is the cost of ambition something you have experienced personally?
I wanted to create a parallel between the past and the present. That’s a good reason to delve into the past: to see what it can teach the present. What, therefore, can we learn from the Trojan War? Well, few of us have actually been to war, and what would be the point of comparing one war with another? Better to compare a past war with a more manageable war, one every reader would know or be able to intuit: the breakdown of a relationship. So the domestic story brings home, literally, what remains external in the war story.
And yes, I’ve experienced the cost of ambition in any number of small ways. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen my partner leave the house with our children when they were very young while I was working in my studio. Every time I asked myself, “Is it worth it? Wouldn’t I rather leave my studio and spend time with my little ones?” I also ask myself that question when I’m on tour, as I am now.
A day away from your children is a day truly lost, the exquisite granularity of love swept away. And yet, to work on a novel, to build something from nothing, contradicting King Lear. To be at the service of a story, bringing it to life. Who wouldn’t lose themself to that, at least for a while?
The novel draws on the idea of the lost manuscript and the unreliable scholar. Were there other writers or books in your mind?
Well, speaking of unreliable scholars, there are the Gospels and their perhaps unreliable narrators. I also read a good number of books on Ancient Greek epic, on the oral tradition, and so on, besides travelling to Greece and Turkey to see with my eyes and feel with my skin. There is something special to that part of the world. The wind and the sun still seem to carry the spores of the ancient past.
In a story like this, what matters more to you: accuracy and credibility or emotional truth?
It has to do with meaning. What I have found in life is that meaning comes from a blend of fact and fiction. We cannot deny facts. That would be living with and within lies. But truth is not reducible to facts. Facts are the ground atop which we build meaning. In Son of Nobody, Harlow says twice, “We’re talking myth here.” Myth is an invention, but one that explains, contextualises, gives meaning. We operate like that, inventing as we walk amidst the real. Myth, therefore, is an invention that discovers, a discovery that is invented.
As Harlow works from fragments to reconstruct a life, the novel asks who has the right to be remembered and who gets written out of the records. Can fiction do justice to forgotten lives?
Better to recover in a partially invented way than not to recover at all. Because that is what the empathetic imagination can do: reclaim what has been lost. And there’s this point too: it is not necessarily our duty to salvage the past or, rather, it is the historian’s but not the artist’s. The artist is not accountable to historical truth but rather to artistic truth, which delivers its goods not necessarily through the truth of fact. Art is more concerned with emotion, psychology, aesthetics. In the quest for those truths, the historical record matters less.
After spending so much time with the history of Ancient Greece and alternative narratives, did you come to understand something more clearly or differently by the end?
I’ve come to understand that we’ve been here before. The futility, indeed, the insanity, of the Trojan War, the wreckage of wrath, the necessity to answer anger with love ― it’s so yesterday and so today.
The Iliad is all about anger management. It is an early call, the first call, for the need for emotional balance. There’s a key line at the end of Son of Nobody, how we “walk on feet of dreams”. We must walk evenly, calmly, not renouncing anger — which can be useful as an engine for change, besides inevitable — but not hopping solely on that foot, just as we cannot always be in a state of pure love. We rather walk with both, left, right, left, right.
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