These are the opening lines of the book, and really he had me at the first sentence. This is the story of the Oresteian tragedy, an Ancient Greek myth which has resonated down the ages. Toibin tells his own version: concentrating on certain parts and filling in some of the gaps and uncertainties of the original stories, which link up with the Trojan War. Toibin follows three lines: Clytemnestra, who murders her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Elektra is another daughter, Iphigenia’s sister, and she wants revenge for her father, and hates both her mother, and her mother’s new lover and co-conspirator, Aegisthus. Orestes is the young son of the family, at the beginning playing with toy weapons and not fully aware what is going on – his will be a long and difficult journey. (His part is told in the third person, while the two women narrate directly.)

I admire Toibin’s work, he is a great writer, but I haven’t loved his previous books the way I love this one: Brooklyn (on the blog here) I found flat and passive, and in the end I preferred the film. But these strange Ancient Greek women, with their passions and their weird ways and their honour and their shame were to me far more convincing and real and human than Irish Eilis of the 1950s. And at the same time his distancing style suited this story very well.




The book is terrifying and sweeping. The strange story Toibin gives to Orestes is hard to pin down: the obvious questions of Where? What? Why? Who? are rarely answered, and he just expects you to believe that no-one ever questions what happens, nor discusses it at all over a period of many years. Yet it digs itself into your brain. It’s so lacking in detail it is hard to visualize, and yet somehow it stays with the reader.

The women have their very individual characters. Electra tells her mother:
‘I want my father to return. Not until then will I feel safe.’ 
Clytemnestra says ‘I was about to tell her that her father’s interest in the safety of his daughters was not something that could be so confidently invoked...’
Later Orestes reports this:
Sometimes Electra spoke of the gods and her belief in them, invoking their names and speaking of the power they had. ‘We live in a strange time,’ Electra said. ‘A time when the gods are fading. Some of us still see them but there are times when we don’t. Their power is waning. Soon, it will be a different world. It will be ruled by the light of day. Soon it will be a world barely worth inhabiting. You should feel lucky that you were touched by the old world, that in that house it brushed you with its wings.’
The gods do not feature in the book at all, this is a human story. One of the final sections features a ghost, one of the characters who is dead: it is a haunting and brilliant tour de force, dead person walking.

I was very sorry that Toibin missed out another sister, Chrysothemis, who appears in other versions – I read the Sophocles Elektra in pursuit of this blogpost (in English – Ancient Greek is possible but slow, though you can see translations from Ancient Greek by me here and here.) And then there is the Strauss opera Elektra, with its discomforting, desolating and wild music.

There are many reasons why I would never have been an opera singer, but if it were possible I would have loved to play Elektra, who is demented and in a permanent state of outrage in the Strauss version, and also has the best stage directions ever:
Elektra flings herself about…
She is dancing a mysterious dance round him and suddenly stooping low…
Elektra descends from the threshold. She has flung back her head like a Maenad. She flings her knees and arms about. It is a nameless dance in which she comes forward

I feel I could have given quite the performance.

Here are some more stage directions from the opera:
(A hurried procession rushes and staggers past the luridly lighted windows; it is a wrenching, a dragging of cattle, a muffled scolding, a quickly choked shouting, the hissing of a whip in the air, a struggling of fallen men and beasts, a staggering onwards. 

In the broad window appears Klytemnestra. Her sallow, bloated face appears, in the lurid glare of the torches, still paler over her scarlet robe. She is leaning on her trusted Confidante, who is draped in dark violet, and on a begemmed ivory staff. A jaundiced figure, with black hair combed back, like an Egyptian woman, with smooth face, resembling a rearing snake, carries the train of her robe. The Queen is covered over and over with gems and talismans, her arms are full of armlets, her fingers bristle with rings. The lids of her eyes are larger than is natural, and it seems to cost her an unspeakable effort to keep them from falling.)
--- so there are the roles for my later career as an opera singer (‘resembling a snake’!), and I think you can all see why it is one of my favourite operas: it has music that sounds like the end of the world.

But amid all the drama and shouting, there is the sister Chrysothemis. Elektra is trying to make her fight for revenge, kill people, swear a life-long feud. But Chrysothemis wants something else:
Ere I die
I crave for life; and children would I bear
Ere all my body fades, e'en were't a peasant
Chosen to wed me; children will I bear him
Rejoicing; to my bosom will I clasp them



 
 Basically (although her complaints would not be the same as a woman today) she is saying ‘Please can’t we just forget all this and live our life and try to be happy, and get on with Mother’s new lover, and stop causing trouble? I want to have a life and get married and have children.’ But Elektra is implacable. They are like so many children of divorced families, with one sibling trying to keep up the feud - one of the ways in which this strange and ancient and foreign and un-modern tale resonates with modern feelings.


So – Colm Toibin, House of Names, opera, Richard Strauss, Elektra – all wonderful and compelling and deeply relevant to us even now… And indeed the plot is in many ways similar to Hamlet: often on the blog in a variety of ways.

And last month I read Madeleine Miller’s terrific Song of Achilles, and did a post on poems about Odysseus. A good time for Ancient Greece.

Pictures:
Engraving of one of the many deaths, from NYPL
.. and another death also from NYPL.
(more detail of murderers and murderees would be a spoiler).
Elektra and Chrysothemis on the NY stage from NYPL.

It actually breaks my heart to say this, but I could not read this. FAR too literary and 'arsey' for me. And I'm doing a BA in English & History. I want to read fiction and enjoy it, not read something that I have to struggle through. I gave up very early on, as I have 100s of books here that I know I will finish. There are literary titles that are mind-blowing, like Donal Ryan, Sebastian Barry, Alan McMonagle, Marie T Robinson, Doreen Finn, Shane Connaughton etc. however this is too much hard work to make it an enjoyable read.
Tóbín is my literary hero. I have loved ALL his books. But this was a chore. I'm gutted. I feel as if I've had a fight with my mother; that awful guilty feeling. *hangs head in shame*

All of the characters in House of Names are like masked actors in Greek tragedy. There is a shadowy quality to them but their motivations touch on universal themes. They draw you into the story and linger in memory long after you close the book.

Ancient Greece is brought vividly to life in Colm Tóibín's reworking of a classic Greek tragedy. This author is a known master of the English language and uses this skill to submerge the reader into a world of family intrigue, betrayal and bloodshed.

Colm Tóibín’s new novel House of Names retells the tragic story of the House of Atreus, described in Aeschylus’ famous trilogy, the Oresteia. Not being very familiar with this story, I had no problem following the plot of the novel, but couldn’t help wondering how different my experience would have been if I was already more well-versed in the Greek classics.

House of Names begins in dramatic style with Agamemnon sacrificing his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. In return the gods will bring about a change in the wind which will allow his army to sail to Troy. Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, is forced to witness the terrible scene – made even worse by the fact that she had believed she was coming to watch her daughter’s wedding, not her murder. The first section of the novel is narrated by Clytemnestra and I thought it was wonderful, vividly describing the moment of the sacrifice and perfectly capturing the agony and heartbreak of a mother at the loss of her child and the bitter fury of a wife at the treachery of her husband. Angry and grieving, Clytemnestra returns to Mycenae to await her husband’s return from Troy and her chance to take revenge:

Her screams as they murdered her were replaced by silence and by scheming when Agamemnon, her father, returned and I fooled him into thinking that I would not retaliate. I waited and I watched for signs, and smiled and opened my arms to him, and I had a table here prepared with food. Food for the fool! I was wearing the special scent that excited him. Scent for the fool!

But what effect will Clytemnestra’s next actions have on her two remaining children, Orestes and Electra? We don’t have to wait long to find out as sections written from the perspective of each of those characters follow. Orestes’ is told in the third person and describes his kidnapping from the palace of Mycenae and his later escape with the help of two other boys, Leander and Mitros. Together, far from home and away from their families, Orestes and his friends must find a way to survive into adulthood. His sister Electra, meanwhile, pushed aside after Iphigenia’s death, watches Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus and begins to plot a revenge of her own…

This has been a difficult review for me to write as I still can’t quite decide what I thought of House of Names! I loved the powerful opening section of this novel but, two weeks after finishing the book, that’s the only part that has really stayed with me. The Orestes and Electra sections, although I found them interesting at the time, felt strangely detached and emotionless. The writing style helped to create an eerie, otherworldly feel at times, but it came at the expense of the passion and intensity I would have preferred from a story like this.

I do think that my lack of knowledge of the Oresteia and the fate of the House of Atreus could have been an advantage rather than a disadvantage as far as this book is concerned. I’ve read several other reviews that mention being confused by Tóibín’s decision to change so many details of the story, such as the use of the character of Leander to fill the role of Pylades, but not being familiar with the original I didn’t even notice things like this. Maybe I should have an attempt at reading the Oresteia itself one day. Does anyone know of a good translation to read?

As for Colm Tóibín, I’m looking forward to reading more of his work. Brooklyn is the only other one of his novels that I’ve read and the two couldn’t be more different. Which of his books do you think I should try next?

There was a time when the gods came in the morning to wake us, when they combed our hair and filled our mouths with the sweetness of speech and listened to our desires and tried to fulfil them for us, when they knew our minds and when they could send us signs.

The story made me think that I should return to Greek mythology soon. I vaguely remember reading about Greek gods when I was younger, but since then, my interests digressed and I have let that lie somewhere in the corner. The stories in mythology are full of scandalous things, from killing the husband to matricide.

Clytemnestra does not believe in the gods anymore, believes that their powers are waning and maybe they are. But when her daughter is sacrificed, the winds change and the warriors win. She attributes all of this to chance, and maybe it was. On the other hand, maybe it was the men's belief in the gods that made them win. However, the theme of the gods' powers waning is present throughout the book

Colm Tobin attempted to revisit a really old story and beloved to many people. Stories like this never get old as they appeal to the universal human psyche and there is nothing wrong for contemporary authors to decide to draw inspiration from them.

The book had some nice parts, mostly in the first bit when we get Clytemnestra's point of view. The prose was electric, elegiac and seems to have done justice to a female figure that tends to be portrayed as the villain of the story. However, I found the parts of Orestes and Electra quite uneven. We missed this thorough insight, which is needed in order to fully understand the motives of these two people. Especially, with Electra, I felt that her depiction was quite cartoonish and plain. Her obsession with her father and her understanding of his murderous act against her own beloved sister is hardly justified in the book. For a modern reader, however, this seems quite outrageous and Electra seems to have acted like a fanatic.

I gave 3 out of 5 stars to this read based on the fact that it was an easy read, and I quite enjoyed Clytemnestra's parts (the first and the ghost part).

I like retellings of Greek myths/legends/drama and was excited by this one but sadly I found it to be superficial and hard to engage with.

We always come back to the Greek myths, don't we? And understandably so as they certainly never lacked for drama. But they also never lacked for gods either, which is probably why Colm Toibin was so intrigued to revisit the most famous Greek drama of them all and reposition it as a drama of human failings, and to look at the devastation and destruction that become inflicted on whole communities as the repercussions of revenge ripple out ever wider.

For here we are back at the House of Atreus. King Agamemnon is beset with concern that his planned attack on Troy will not go well so, in an attempt to appease the gods and win their favour, he decides to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to them. Not only is this a heinous act, but it is one he does through both fooling and imprisoning his wife, Clytemnestra, and his other children, Electra and Orestes. And we all know where it goes from there...

This reexamination, this exploration, is told from three viewpoints - Clytemnestra's, Electra's and Orestes's. The first - Clytemnestra's - is by far the most intoxicating and most successful. Told entirely in the first person, Toibin returns to a much-loved subject of the suffering of mothers.

Here, we witness the rage of a mother who must wait years for her revenge. And a woman who must plot and plan and find a way to exert the control and authority needed to undertake such an act in a world where men rule and women obey. This section of the book is quite extraordinary. It is intense and powerful and the tension in how Clytemnestra must hide and bite down on her rage and anger, yet keep it fed for all that time until her husband returns, is quite something..

Electra's sections are less powerful, but deliberately so. Electra's desire for revenge seem less intense, until you realise that there is something quite off-balance about her - that the way she sees herself and her behaviour is not how the rest of her world see her.

She is persistently visited by the ghosts of her sister and father, and you sense Toibin here is trying to explore madness, perhaps. Certainly what she sees as logical behaviour, or at least understandable - such as wearing her sister's clothes - becomes distressing scenes for her mother and those of the Royal Court. For these sections, you feel the journey is more powerful than the climax as once she has her revenge, Electra seems to peter away, her intensity fades.

It is in Orestes's sections that Toibin takes the most risks, for it is never really explained in the play where Orestes disappeared to all those years he was away. Was he in Athens? Was he on the run? We never know. So here, Toibin envisages that Orestes is kidnapped on Aegisthus's orders (the lover of the Queen is a malevolent force in this drama) but he escapes and, through his eyes, we see how the lives of the ordinary people of Mycenae have been affected by this never-ending cycle of civil war that is unleashed upon them from Agamemnon constantly taking their husbands and sons to fight overseas wars, from the subsequent Game of Thrones-esque dramas of the Royal Court, and then how this all feeds into an uprising that will overtake the Royal Court completely.

The vision here is quite impressive. Only thing is that Orestes is lost in all this drama. He seems a very weak individual and, it must be said, Toibin doesn't invest this character with motivation in quite the same way as he does with his women. Orestes never really convinces as a fully-fleshed out complex young man, but his journey is the vehicle for a very ambitious examination of how communities are destroyed when elites battle and scheme amongst themselves. And I think we can all safely say that is a tale as old as time.

I have recently been studying Greek myths as part of my English Literature degree, so I was really excited to read this book.  The story is based on the myth of when Agamemnon (King of the Greeks) sacrificed his daughter to appease the gods and get the winds to change direction so that he could sail off to war.  He sounds like a idiot if you ask me.

The story is told from 3 perspectives and begins with Clytemnestra, who is the wife of Agamemnon who witnesses her husband sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods by slaughtering her as if she were an animal. When Clytemnestra tries to stop it, she is thrown into a hole by her husbands men and left there for a few days.  Understandably she then makes the decision to get her revenge on Agamemnon.  She begins an affair with a notorious warrior that Agamemnon had been keeping in the palace dungeons, and together they plot to kill him on his return from battle. 

The other 2 perspectives are told through the eyes of her son Orestes and her other daughter Electra.  The story unfolds over many years and follows the repercussions of Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon.  Colm Toibin's writing is really engrossing and descriptive.  I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it to others.  I think that it would make a great movie or TV series, and I certainly wouldn't object if Colm Toibin chose to write more retellings of Ancient Greek myths.  I've got my fingers crossed that he appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.
The only thing that could have improved the book was that I felt like it ended suddenly and maybe I was missing some pages! Part 2 maybe? A great read that I would definitely recommend.

Tόibίn has been around for a good while and written several notable titles, including Man Booker Shortlisted titles and a film adaptation of Brooklyn in 2015. But I have yet to sample his work. Thankfully, I have now broken that trend, with his newest release: House of Names.

King Agamemnon makes a horrific choice: the day she was to be married, Agamemnon has his daughter sacrificed. It is brutal and shocking. It is the will of the Gods. It is only this act that will bring him favour in the Trojan War. Or so he believes. This brutal act leaves a legacy of grief and treachery for his wife, Clytemnestra and they’re surviving children, Orestes and Electra.

As a student and lover of the classics, I found it fascinating. House of Names is based on Greek myths that I am not particularly familiar with, so I don’t know how true it is to historical sources, but given Tόibίn’s calibre, I think we can safely assume that a fair amount of research went into it. Something I really appreciated and enjoyed while reading this novel, was the considered effort to create an ancient – and therefore timeless – narrative. The writing style reminded me of that which we find in existing ancient texts, such as Livy.

It is a style that shuns embellishment and uses very little description. Yes, landscapes have their dimensions and facets – be they open fields or cold stone prison cells. And yes, characters have their thoughts and actions – be they private and murderous or steadfast and brave. But Tόibίn finds more than that unnecessary. The result is an action driven narrative, governed by its restrained descriptive style. My imagination thrived on this starvation of description, and when I think back to some of the action scenes in the book, vivid images instantly appear inside my mind.

While this is a story driven by soul-consuming emotion, Tόibίn’s decision to heavily restrain his character’s voices compresses and represses these violent emotions, emulating the experience of his characters. Unfortunately, while I found the style overall to be effective, it was the restraint that prevented me from truly connecting with the characters. I felt removed from them. Therefore, even when a first person narrative was being used, I could only observe and not empathise with them.

Perhaps that was intentional on the part of Tόibίn; a decision made as part of his endeavour to recall this ancient myth of murder, betrayal and power.

If you grew up with this story, you may be surprised by Colm Toibin's retelling. I did, and I was. Re-tellings, as we now think of them, are as old as the legends of Troy, and, in the hands of great writers, such as Aeschylus, made those legends. His Oresteia took Athens from one of the 'Returns', that of Agamemnon, through the duty of revenge, into contemporary Athens with its public trials replacing private vendetta. That is, one of the key stories of Troy, already looking backward to Bronze Age Greece, was modernised by accepting a heroic age that belonged to a distant time but made relevant to the present. Nothing new about that, then. In 2006 the bilingual and dual national, Jonathan Littell, won both the Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie francaise for his resetting of the story in Chechnya, Les Bienveillants ('The Kindly Ones'), and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011). In Toibin's version, he nods from time to time in the direction of alternative truths, weaving first-person narratives into a narration. The first third of the book is Clytemnaestra's, and it sets the book's denial of gods, and its creation of a godless. lawless, world in which murder is normal. Iphigenia is the accepting sacrifice bowing to the exigencies of war and Electra is the family hysteric of myth and legend. Orestes is a damaged boy and youth, with no Pylades by his side, but, rather, yet another ambitious man hunting for revenge and for power. Usually, rewritings of myth are instrumental to some degree. This one appears to be a lingering meditation on social and individual breakdown in society that has lost its boundaries and, with it, its governance. Toibin did a lot of research for this book, from classical myths, legends, and tragedies, to other people's understanding of the family tragedy, to contemporary books, and, above all, to the over-deitied presence of .murder in Northern Ireland and in the hands of Islamic State.

Coln Toibin takes us into the Greek Mythological world of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. And pretty bloody it is too starting from the sacrifice of their daughter to the Gods, by Agamemnon, in the hope of their support in his up coming battles. Life hardly gets better within the family with lovers, jealousies, scheming and deceit...Can the surviving children restore sanity? Not simply. It's all something of a "Soap Opera" but gripping, nonetheless.

This is a retelling of a classic tale. Now I am not someone who read or studied Classics so I come to this story with limited knowledge. This lack of knowledge didn't effect the enjoyment of the book though.
It is a retelling of the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and is told from three different perspectives Clytemnestra, her daughter, Electra, and her son, Orestes.
It is essentially about family, love, betrayal and trust and is brutal to all involved in the story. I found the perspective from Orestes the most interesting and would have liked the whole story to be from his perspective.
I was completely hooked on the story and couldn't put it down. It is a great read and I highly recommend especially for a holiday read.

House of names by Colm Toibin.
They cut her hair before they dragged her to the place of sacrifice. Her mouth was gagged to stop her cursing her father, her cowardly, two-tongued father. Nonetheless, they heard her muffled screams.'

On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice. His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory. Three years later, he returns home and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence, as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers. As his wife seeks his death, his daughter, Electra, is the silent observer to the family's game of innocence while his son, Orestes, is sent into bewildering, frightening exile where survival is far from certain. Out of their desolating loss, Electra and Orestes must find a way to right these wrongs of the past even if it means committing themselves to a terrible, barbarous act.

Bit slow but I managed to read it. I just took my time but then it got good. But I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. 3*. Netgalley and penguin books UK.

A true treasure and a fabulous retelling done with restraint. This project could easily have dissolved into hyperbole but not so with Colm Toibin, who is The Master in more ways than one!

This was an interesting take on a classic tale - I liked it, but I think I prefer the source material.

I was struck from the beginning by the pared back but lyrical writing. As the author says
"Now our words are trapped in time, they are filled with limits, they are mere distractions, they are as fleeting and monotonous as breath."

The writing seems to keep close to the stark nature of the Greek tragedy it is retelling. There is no great character exposition just the tragic inevitability of the plot pulling us along. like a riptide.

It begins with Clytemnestra who murders her husband Agamemnon, because he is willing to sacrifice their daughter, Iphigenia to the gods for a favourable wind for his war (having tricked her into believing that there was to be a marriage)

Their son Orestes is kidnapped but escapes with the ailing Mithros and Leander to form the second section of the plot. Meanwhile Clytemnestra has taken up with the evil Aegisthus watched by the observant but largely silent Electra.

The plot then takes these threads and unwinds them to the ensuing tragedies.

The sections narrated by the women are narrated in the first person. However the sections narrated by Orestes are in the third person. I wonder why Toibin did this? Is it because women are often lacking a voice, especially in the time in which the action takes place ?

Toibin at times explores the differing attitudes to the gods and the concept of free will v. Destiny/Fate.

"' ...the gods have nothing to do with us , Leander shouted. Nothing! We will get nothing more from them. Their time is over"

Another theme he explore is the nature of memory "which connects and withdraws". It is memory which we have as individuals which is an undercurrent to the larger sweep of history.

I was thinking about this book in the context of other myths, legends and tragedies. It seems to keep the bleakness of the original Greek tragedies (eh Sophocles) without putting a modern "spin" on it like Winterton's "Weight" or Attwood's The Penelopiad. It doesn't go down the character route like Miller's The Song of Achilles.

I am glad it keeps the original character of the Greek tragedies. I have found some of Toibin's previous books rather turgid but sped through this one.

I absolutely love Colm Tóibín's writing and this had a very similar feel to The Testament of Mary which is my favorite. It's a really interesting take on The House of Atreus tragedy and an enjoyable read. The characters feel completely real in your mind but you can't help but feeling disappointed in them all. by the end. But I guess that's tragedy for you...