New review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

As soon as I finished Circe I thought about how great it would be to have Penelope's side of the story during The Odyssey. Luckily, one of my greatest friends had an answer for me - one did indeed exist, written by none other than Margaret Atwood.

It's no secret that rich, noble women were used as tools in marriage contracts throughout history, but the use of Penelope in this story puts paid to the idea that Odysseus and Penelope necessarily married for love. Theirs is touted as one of the greatest loves of all time - the weary hero who spends ten years after a ten year war in Troy trying to get back to his wife, the woman who is separated from her husband for twenty years, not knowing if he is alive or dead, surviving only on rumour.

Some of this is true. But as for their love - well, Penelope (at least, in this retelling) is only fifteen when she is married off to Odysseus. In Atwood's version, Odysseus and Penelope do have great affection for each other, but not necessarily reaching the great heights as shown in The Odyssey. 

But that's not the point of Atwood's story. The point is how Penelope had to defend her home for nearly two decades - including her maids, the ones who were so callously murdered by Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey. This was justified then because they were disloyal to Penelope and Odysseus and ingratiated themselves with the suitors, but Penelope spins a different yarn. She shows more of their humanity - the fact that these maids were teenagers, therefore used and abused by the suitors. She asked them to ingratiate themselves with the suitors, who were eating Penelope out of house and home, in order to find out their true minds. After all, they were spewing out declarations of love all day and every day to Penelope, when all they wanted was her property.

Penelope tells her story from Hades - she is already dead when the story begins. The maids have their moments, too, and show their side through the medium of a traditionally Ancient Greek dramatic chorus line. It's a very clever book, considerably deep in spite of its brevity. What's particularly clever is at the finale of the book when Odysseus is represented by an attorney, a whole moment that resonates in the #MeToo era, despite being written over a decade before the Weinstein story broke.

Saying Margaret Atwood has written a brilliant story is like saying the Pope is Catholic but just because something is obvious does not make it any less worth stating. I definitely recommend this if you are looking for a different angle on a well-known epic story, most particularly one that humanises otherwise fairly 2d characters from the original.