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Where Three Roads Meet

Old wine in new skins

Salley Vickers
Canongate, 195pp, £12.99,

Molly Guinness

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Molly Guinness

Canongate has commissioned various distinguished authors to retell the myths, and whether by choice or bad luck, Salley Vickers got landed with Oedipus. The problem with this story is that the details are so horribly memorable and its poet so good that there is nothing really to add. The Greek tragedians could play fast and loose with the myths and adapt even major details to suit their purposes, but when a story has become so enshrined, we are left with little to do but admire and analyse it. This is what Vickers has done: Tiresias goes to see Freud and tells him the tale. She has plundered the Greek play freely and, in terms of plot, furnished us only with an elongated version of Sophocles, adding a little about Tiresias’ childhood for good measure. The interest lies in the analytical bent. Her contribution is to tell us that ‘it was her [Jocasta’s] deepest never-to-be-spoken desire ...to recover to her womb her precious first-born son’, and similar observations. Here lies the second problem: we all know the kind of things Freud would say, and so his take on the story is necessarily somewhat predictable.

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