Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

Canadian author Yann Martel is best known for his 2002 Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi. There is no comparison with his latest book Son of Nobody except to say that this may well also be in contention for literary awards, if only for its style and its ambition. Son of Nobody purports to be a lost version of the story of the Trojan War, complete with footnotes that also reflect on the life of the man who found its fragments, pulled them together and translated them.

Son of Nobody opens with Canadian academic Harlow Donne telling the story of a piece of broken Greek pottery on which he found a clue to an untold story of the Trojan War:

“From hints and scraps, mere hoary whispers from millennia ago, I managed to construct thirty coherent fragments of The Psoad…”

The tale that Donne presents is the story Psoas Son of Nobody. Psoas was one of the many commoners that formed the Greek armies that besieged Troy and who are overlooked in the epic stories of gods and heroes. Donne finds fragments of the story of Psoas while doing other research in Oxford, an academic posting that has taken him away from his wife Gail, with whom he has a particularly fractious relationship, and his seven-year-old daughter Helen. Through some of the more personal footnotes to The Psoad, readers will learn more about Donne’s relationship, his family and some of his poorer decision-making as he goes down the rabbit-hole of his research.

The book is presented in two halves. On the top half of the pages is The Psoad, a more grounded version of The Iliad with less nobles and gods (although some of the Greek generals come and go from the story and Hades does make an appearance towards the end), translated in blank verse. On the bottom halves of the pages are the footnotes, some of which are academic and explanatory of the text, others are used by Donne to reflect on his life. This is particularly as he starts to find  parallels between his own journey to Oxford and that of his hero Psoas – a man who leaves his family to go to earn money and honour on the battlefield.

Son of Nobody is a prodigious work that manages to operate on a number of levels. Martel has written a fictional yet credible Greek epic poem in the style of the Iliad, supported by scholarly interpretation, that gives a very different but in some ways more believable view into a famous story. He then lets this story resonate with the personal and emotional journey of its translator which itself has elements of Greek tragedy.

There are plenty of retellings of Greek mythology doing the rounds at the moment. Pat Barker’s incredible Women of Troy trilogy of books focussed on the women who were central to the conflict and its aftermath. Mark Haddon also jumps through time and literary interpretation in his exploration of the story of Pericles in The Porpoise.  But Son of Nobody is even more ambitious than these retellings. Martel successfully puts himself in the shoes of a Greek storyteller while also drawing parallels across time to deliver a deeply erudite and resonant work of fiction.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

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9.0/10