A gruesome retelling

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the casus belli, the other the most infamous agent of the aftermath. Another Irish writer now takes up the story, without the magnificent cloak of myth. House of Names is a portrait of a brutal, disenchanted world of political tyranny, slaughter and revenge.

In the first section, ‘Clytemnestra’, Agamemnon’s queen is an imposing but still sympathetic figure as she joyously accompanies her daughter Iphigenia to Aulis to betroth her, she thinks, to the warrior Achilles. Eager to get to Troy, Achilles is either not bright enough or too careless to keep up the deception, and the queen is forced to hand the girl over to be sacrificed for a fair wind. Agamemnon is not the noble figure invoked in Yeats’s stately verse but a shifty dissembler, yet the consequences of his removal will be alarming. Even with strong man Aegisthus at her side and in her bed, Clytemnestra has not considered that ‘Agamemnon dead’ will bring its own problems.

Fiction by Colm Tóibín is never less than elegantly fashioned, but the opening passage gives few hints about what attracted him to this archaic material and what he hopes to add to it. Clues come with the second passage, ‘Orestes’. In the legends the young prince disappears from the story, leaving mother and lover to rule, while Orestes’ sister Electra likewise bides her time. Here Tóibín constructs a plausible filler. Stripped of his royal status, Orestes is kidnapped at Aegisthus’ command and shipped off with other youths from the nobility, the better to control their families.