Book review: “Son of Nobody” by Yann Martel

What was Yann Martel thinking?

I’m talking about the title of his new novel Son of Nobody, a double-barreled story of a lost epic about the Trojan War and of the scholar who discovers and translates the work.

The cover art for the Norton hardcover makes it clear that this is a book about the era of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Odysseus and all the other Greek and Trojan heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

And, for anyone even vaguely familiar with those epics, the title says one thing: This is a tale about a son of Odysseus, perhaps Telemachus or some bastard from his ten years of wandering after the fall of Troy.

In the world of Homer, Odysseus is Nobody.

Here’s why: In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his sailors are caught in the cave of the giant cyclops Polyphemus. After gobbling up two of the crew for supper and then two more for breakfast, the cyclops asks Odysseus his name. “Nobody,” he’s told, and he promises to eat “Nobody” last. The Greek hero turns the tables, however, poking out Polyphemus’s only eye with a stake and escaping from the cave.

In one of the rare jokes in Homer, the blinded cyclops yells for help from other giants, shouting that “Nobody” has hurt him. They shrug their shoulders.

 

Just a guy

But Martel’s novel isn’t about a son of Odysseus. It’s about an epic poem about Psoas of Midea, described at every mention as “the son of nobody,” meaning he’s a commoner, not royalty nor aristocracy, just a guy.

The lost epic, pieced together by a present-day son of nobody Harlow Donne, is called the Psoad, and it’s something of a counter-Iliad, a tale of the Trojan War from the foot soldier’s point of view.

The continual references to Psoas as “the son of nobody” are a reminder and commentary on how Homer identifies every named character in the Iliad — there are more than 700 of them — by mentioning his or her father and often the snippet or more of a story. By the way, as Harlow Donne notes, only one commoner has a speaking role in the Iliad, Thersites — the man Donne decides was the author of the Psoad.

So, for an alternative-Iliad, the title of Son of Nobody makes sense — except for that Odysseus connection.

 

An itch

I wonder if I’m being too persnickety.

I’m no Homer expert, but I’ve read the epics in several translations and read some books about the epics. And I know that you don’t have to be a student of Homer to have heard the cyclops story.

Certainly, anyone who studied liberal arts in college is likely to have heard the story (and, really, they’re the most likely readers of Son of Nobody). Business majors, maybe not.

For a long way into Son of Nobody, even toward the end, I kept expecting a big revelation that — aha! — Psoas was somehow Odysseus’s child.  It wasn’t a huge let-down that it never came. Yet, the waiting for the surprise that never arrived was a distraction, like an itch I could never scratch.

I could have ignored it, but then there was the actual story that Martel was telling, and I found myself asking throughout the book and especially at the end:

What was Yann Martel thinking?

 

A-game

Maybe Son of Nobody is an elaborate spoof or parody that I’m missing.  If so, it’s pretty subtle.

A quarter of a century ago, Martel published the Life of Pi, a strange and beautiful novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. A story that combines religious allegory and an adventure tale, Life of Pi was praised by U.S. President Barack Obama as “an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling.”

Even with such success, it must be daunting for a writer to compete as directly with Homer as Martel does in Son of Nobody.

The epic poems Iliad (15,693 lines) and the Odyssey (12,109 lines), originally transmitted orally and only later written down, were composed more than 2,700 years ago. The foundational works of Western literature, they are still read and studied and revered today. Homer is credited as their author although no one is sure who he might have been or whether there might have been two or more storytellers.

So, if you dare to walk onto the same playing field as Homer, you’d better bring your A-game.

 

“Faster than news could be shouted”

And that’s what Martel does, at least some of the time.

The core of the Psoad is the taunting antagonism on the battlefield between Psoas and Prince Mestor, one of the fifty sons of the Trojan King Priam.

After one such session, as Prince Mestor seems to fade away deep into the Trojan ranks, an enraged Psoas takes off, running behind enemy lines in view of both armies, as Thersites recounts in a later conversation with the commoner hero:

“Others saw you, too, Argive and Trojan,

but we all knew here, while you were over there,

moving fast, running like a zigzagging hare…

Only you were Argive — but how could they know?

You were running faster than news could be shouted

and understood, ‘There, that man there! Stop him!’…

 

“War is a crowd. We lost you behind people,

we lost you to distance.”

 

And, just as Psoas is about to reach Mestor, the prince enters a small door in the city gate and is gone.

“You ran and ran and ran. Where now? Back to us,

picking up swords and spears along the way

and killing men as you ran…”

“Hello?”

That’s good stuff, stirring and compelling like a Homer description of a hero on the battlefield.

Yet, how to square that with what seems like clumsy colloquial language at other places, such as, a few pages earlier, when Thersites addresses Psoas:

Thersites came up to the son of nobody,

there, not far from the banks of the Scamander,

and said to him, “Psoas, hello? Hello?

I am speaking to you…”

It is as if Martel has suddenly dropped his characters into a high school lunchroom. Which is just very odd.

 

Ham-handed

Parallelling the reconstruction of the fictional Psoad are the footnotes of their reconstructor, Harlow Donne, and, through a scholarly, ivory-tower fog, he tells the story of this reconstruction and the deconstruction — no, forget the cleverness — the tragedy of his family: his estrangement from his wife and the death of their daughter named Helen. [SPOILER (although, to be honest, Helen’s death is signaled from the earliest pages).]

Homer’s epics and the Psoad are soaked in blood and violence, and these footnotes, taking up the bottom half of about half of the novel’s pages, are as bloodless as the dry scraps of papyrus that Donne pieces together to create, recreate, the Psoad.

It seems at best a fairly ham-handed way of critiquing academia if that’s was Martel’s aim.

What was Yann Martel thinking?

 

“Mere wisps of evidence”

And then there’s the whole initially understated subplot in which Donne is constantly drawing parallels between the Psoad and the Bible, the Gospels and the accounts of the life of Jesus, all, to his mind, as mythical as Homer’s epics and as the story of Psoas.

It becomes more and more apparent that Donne is finding these connections at every turn, culminating finally — yeah, maybe this is a SPOILER but the assertion is so absurd that the unprepared reader will only be left aghast — in the assertion that the story of Jesus was a myth rooted in the Psoas myth.

This, because Psoas has brought to Hades the body of a dead child, and the god breaks down into tears, having, for the first time, come to understand death. As the Psoad relates: “Hades wept.”

Which, of course, echoes: “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)

And Martel, through Donne, explains:

It was a mortal who had gone too far with his violence who taught an immortal that lesson, and that immortal never recovered.  It was Hades, learning from Psoas of Midea, the son of nobody, who expressed the idea: “I must die” (15). He said it, and it was done. A Greek god was heard by a Jewish god, thanks to a Greek-speaking Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who wrote epistles about a Jewish messiah, the earliest texts of Christianity.

And so the conclusion: Jesus came from the incurable lassitude of a Greek soldier at Troy…

Troy: Jerusalem; Psoas, Jesus. Contrary complements. Stories that are at the start and end of Western culture, our founding myths…For both, we have mere wisps of evidence, then stories, then the Greeks and the Christians. The creation of the same form: wisps, stories, a people.

 

What is the reader to say?

What was Yann Martel thinking?

Son of Nobody is a novel.  It’s playing with ideas and with stories. But, as the journey through the Psoad and through Donne’s footnotes comes to an end, what is Martel expecting of the reader?

To say, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Christianity is nothing but a myth based upon other myths”? (Many modern people don’t need a fictional Greek epic to think that.)

Or to say: “Boy, those academics can really go out on limb with silly theories”? (Making fun of scholars is something half of the American nation and its present president enjoy doing without needing to reference a made-up epic about a commoner.)

Or to say: “Gee, this is just like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, tearing away two thousand years of mystification to see, finally, the truth in all its trueness”?

What was Yann Martel thinking?

I have no idea, and all I can say is: “Hello??????”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.13.26