Myths - a review of three books that revisit ancient myths

Close your eyes and think of a story. I bet images from fairytales come flooding in — red sashes, scimitars, pools of tears, golden tombs: romantic visions that set us exploring what it is to be human. The mind's eye likes pictures. Metaphysical ideas roost happily in a physical setting.

Which is why — once upon a time — myths were not only ubiquitous, but in your face. Offerings would be left at roadside shrines, all situated significantly: on the very spot where Theseus unburied his sword or the grove where Aphrodite loosened her girdle to tempt Paris; Greek virgins' bridal wreaths were woven with the same flowers that bedecked Helen's; the ashes of the dead started their journey to the afterlife in myth-themed urns. (A gruesome aside; these paintings are particularly well preserved when human fat seeps into the pottery.)

Because we live in a print-heavy age, the publisher Canongate has sponsored as our myth-merchants not stonemasons, painters or dramatists, but wordsmiths. Ritual self-exploration comes courtesy of prettily bound pages. Six reworkings of ancient myths have been published, now come three more. It has become something of a sport waiting to discover who will be next to explore how we should/could/should not behave.
Salley Vickers steps up to Oedipus and his love for his mum Jocasta. In her Where Three Roads Meet, Freud flees Germany with his protectress, the (spearless) goddess Athena. A blind visitor tracks him down to North London. Freud's mouth and jaw are filleted by cancer, propped open by a grazing prosthesis, but the two share a dialogue.

Muthoi first meant “things that were spoken”. Myths transferred information, and Vickers' account is plump with shared knowledge; we learn of Freud's favourite pain relief, the daily routine of a Delphic priest, the Middle Eastern provenance of hollyhocks. The conceit is satisfying. Vickers, a psychologist as well as a novelist, gives the dying Freud the pleasure of reliving his touchstone Greek tragedy with an eyewitness. It is simply and strongly done, laying bare many of our mortal anxieties.

Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong is even simpler — a straight retelling of an idiosyncratic journey. At first — with all the grace of a truculent four-year-old craving Cinderella rather than unfamiliar folklore sent by a well-meaning aunt — I couldn't settle to it. Myths work at their best when they are cocooned with familiar cultural references. Su Tong's disarming naivety (one chapter ends: “Overcome by exhaustion, Binu and the boy fell to the ground and slept.”) can feel weird. But then China's strange landscape — the Fragrant Forest, Great Swallow Mountain and the Blue Cloud Prefecture — starts to mesmerise. Binu's struggles, as she attempts to deliver a coat to her husband, who has been pressganged into building the Great Wall, as she is chained to a coffin,and hunted by deer-boys and candy-selling assassins have the acuity of a dream.
The Chinese language is also a visual art, and the painterly quality of Tong's words is striking: a moon's silver hand strokes an oatfield. Lime-white slaves' mortar-rasped lungs spill out scarlet blood. Little surprise that Tong's Raise the Red Lantern became such a visually exciting film, and that this new myth-picture splashes in the memory.

Ali Smith's killer opener lays out her variegated palette: “Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.” Her Girl Meets Boy admits how humdrum are orthodox gender distinctions. Two eccentric sisters change the orientation of their lives thanks to Robin, a gay, spraycan-wielding activist.
The tale is charming, the prose (in places) poetic. Smith remembers what the ancients knew: that musical words drum a beat through to understanding. But there are too many cadences for my taste.
Smith deals not just with one myth (Ovid's homoerotic child-lovers Iphis and Ianthe, who metamorphose into boy and girl), but also with the corporate manufacture of myth (thin=good, fresh water=not a human right). I would have been delighted to stick with the girl-boy grandpa and his evolving granddaughters.

Myths are traditionally transmitted by men but these three are catalysed by women. There is a popular coffee-table (in my case, coffee-stained) book, Women in Mythology, that is all streaming hair, wild eyes and laudanum-chic passive. The Canongate heroines are refreshingly down to earth. Smith even includes contemporary data about the state of being female; for example that in no country in the world do women's wages equal men's.
Good for her. In Roget's Thesaurus myth is under two headings — “Imagination” and “Untruth”. But we make a false distinction between myth and history, as if between the unreal and the real. When historia was invented in the 5th century BC it encompassed observation, inquiry, analysis and myth. Of course. Muthoi were points of information. Myths don't tell us what lies beyond the world, they tell us what is in it. Canongate's series is a clutch of mongrel eggs. As with Leda's nest in the Spartan foothills, it is never clear if each shell hides a warrior or a saviour, Helen or Klytem-nestra. But thank God the curious brood exists.