The narrator in Son of Nobody, Yann Martel’s fifth novel, is Harlow Donne, a classicist and PhD candidate who goes to Oxford University to work on an obscure project to decode the (correctly named) Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Instead, Harlow stumbles upon an unknown Trojan war story featuring an ordinary soldier called Psoas. It is a name he has previously encountered on some fragments of pottery (ostraka) in a museum; intrigued, he is sucked into the story. Harlow has left his wife Gail and daughter Helen behind in Canada, and this mirrors soldiers who abandon their families when they join a war.
Harlow’s translation of the poem about Psoas—which he calls The Psoad (a riff on The Iliad by Homer)—becomes the mainframe of the book, while copious footnotes deliver a parallel narrative with hilarious, geeky information about details in the poem, as well as the narrator’s own reflections and emotional struggles. The two stories echo each other—the ancient Trojan war and the modern domestic squabble, the soldier and the researcher both missing their families.
Psoas is “a goat-teat puller, a cheesemaker, a fixer of fences”, an ordinary man from Midea, fighting on the side of the Greeks. There is a clear pecking order—people like Psoas do not talk back to heroes, for “heroes cut down/ordinary men like blades of grass are scythed,/ and never did a blade of grass try to strike back”. When another nobody called Thersites is thrashed for insubordination, Psoas is overcome with brotherly love and goes to commiserate with him. Thersites complains about their lot, and their “miserable, anonymous deaths”.
“Who will sing of me, who will sing of you?
Why are we so little deserving of song?
Yet I’m a stupid goat, son of nobody?”
What motivates these nobodies to fight in other people’s wars? Psoas joined the war for the spoils, but ends up with none. Alternating between fright and bravado, these sons of nobodies get their share of slashing and mauling the enemy. But, unschooled in war etiquette, they may even go too far—an angry Psoas mauls Prince Mestor of Troy so badly that it brings down god Hades himself. When Hades asks Psoas to bring him the “flesh of death”, Psoas takes him the body of a child—the pathos is so intense that Hades begins to weep.
Phrases in the main poem about the war trigger recollections and musings from Harlow’s personal life. The footnotes are geeky, and the trivia are presented with utmost seriousness.
Like The Iliad, the narrative of The Psoad is episodic. One anecdote has Psoas chatting around a table with a Trojan carpenter, Elianthus, before killing him; eventually, the table has “four empty sides”. A 25-page episode spins a new theory about how Helen of Troy was actually lawfully wedded to Prince Hector, and never abducted, contradicting the Iliad version.
Phrases in the main poem about the war trigger recollections and musings from Harlow’s personal life. The pyre to cremate Patroclus, Achilles’ friend, recalls an anecdote about how an American was cremated in Goa by a collective of Westerners.
The footnotes are geeky, and the trivia are presented with utmost seriousness. From the impossibility of bronze armour and likelihood of wood and linen to maps of the Aegean sea, and the dactylic hexameter, we learn much about the nuts and bolts of the ancient wars and classical epics. A phrase such as “land dry as camel shit” leads to a fascinating footnote about how camels are not native to Greece, but could have been encountered in North Africa. The yarn of Psoas and Harlow (and Martel) features giraffes, “with whom the Greeks had imaginary and perhaps real relations”; and a Trojan elephant instead of the Trojan horse.
And this is where a sub-plot unravels, about the blurring between history and fable, between fact and fiction, between canonical religious text and literary works. As the epic takes on religious seriousness, the Bible becomes an epic. Martel asks: “to what extent are these ancient songs history, and to what degree, fiction?... This seminal event of antiquity, along with other foundational stories of the great past—Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Gospels and the like— all belong to the verdant realm of fiction (hence their power), with only a few, thread-like tendrils reaching out to verifiable facts.”
In the Greek epic, war is foregrounded while broken souls are mourned in the background; while “with the story of the Jesus of Nazareth, we have love constantly discussed and concretely enacted in the foreground before a background of hatred and violence. It’s the exact inverse of The Iliad.” The parallels are spelt out: “Troy: Jerusalem. Psoas: Jesus. Contrary complements. Stories that are at the start and heart of Western culture, our founding myths, the first, the oldest, offering redemption through poetry, the second, the latter, salvation by faith. For both, we have mere wisps of evidence, then stories, then the Greeks and the Christians”.
All said and done, the book may appeal more to poets, classicists, or simply those who have already read Homer and are familiar with the conventions of Greek epics. The bifurcation of the main narrative and footnotes is not a new format; an example from Indian writing is Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers, which has a similar parallel narrative. But the classical content that Martel probes in so much detail automatically demands more attention. For the reader willing to work for it, Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody is delectable.