It’s not often I finish a book and immediately go back to the beginning and start again. Tóibín is a master of his craft. His lyrical prose – quiet and steady – leads us through his interpretation of the tragedy of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. He shows us how one act leads to another and another until everyone is steeped in blood. In Clytemnestra’s suddenly godless world she is free to act without constraint or guidance and can use the excuse of personal tragedy as the trigger for acts of greed and aggrandisation.

The story is well-enough known through Aeschylus’s Oresteia and other accounts, though Tóibín’s version differs in various ways and, of course, goes deeper. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the gods for success in battle. Clytemnestra takes revenge by killing him in his bath. She takes up with Aegisthus, a captive from an earlier battle – a relationship she quickly loses control over – and things go from bad to worse. Aegisthus has his own ambitions. I found myself initially siding with Clytemnestra and never completely abandoned her despite her mistakes and viciousness. She presents ultimately a sorry figure.

Electra, very much her father’s daughter, is angry and suspicious. Orestes has been sent away as a boy by Aegisthus with, probably, his mother’s collusion, so he will not witness the killing of his father. He has been imprisoned and mistreated, eventually escaping with his friend, and later lover, Leander, with whom lives for years away from home. When he returns and discovers the truth, Electra convinces him to help her murder their mother and Aegisthus.

Switching between the points of view of Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, the novel takes us deep into the minds of the protagonists. Clytemnestra is fiery and driven by vengeance and hurt. Her language is bloody and graphic. She is a woman of passion and determination.

Orestes begins as a young boy, excited by playing with swords and mimicking his father, but quickly growing up during his captivity. He is confused, kept in the dark, afraid but brave for Leander’s sake. Leander is the leader here, the one with greater clarity. I would have liked a little more detail of timescale during this part as Orestes seems to suddenly be a man when he has so recently been a little boy.

Electra lives in shadows, watches and waits and plans her own revenge. She is something of an enigma, seeming to care little about Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and with her loyalty all to her father.

The characters in this version of the tale do not act in accordance with the whims of the gods, they are responsible for their own actions. Even Agamemnon, who appeases the gods of war by sacrificing Iphigenia, does so more because his men insist upon it rather than according to his own beliefs.

This is a fascinating account of how a family falls apart and of how power corrupts. Tóibín remains at the top of his game in this move away from his recent books set in Ireland.

Retelling a Greek myth about Iphigenia's murder by her father, Agamemnon, and her mother's revenge alongside her lover Aegisthus is an ambitious project and Toibin manages it terrifically well. A new twist on sympathy for Clytemnestra, the grieving mother, horrified that her father would kill her to carry on with a war their men are all devoted to - lost in the middle are her other children, Orestes and Elektra - intricate politicking, and then a period of kidnap and survival and everyone turns against each other - the messagebeing that the gods don't care so no reason to appease them or pray to them - we are left to fend for ourselves. I absolutely could not put this story down - getting inside everyone's heads and appreciating why they do what they do is utterly engaging - i kept trying to remember the story from the ancient plays I'd read. Wholly successful for me ..

Firstly let me state that I am not familiar with the Greek Myth that Colm Tóibín is retelling here, and I consider this an advantage as it allows me to see the work in its own right, without comparing it to what has gone before.
As always Tóibín is masterful in his use of prose, the writing, particularly in the parts of the book written from Clytemnestra's perspective.
The book tells the tale of a wife forced to see her husband condemn their daughter to death, as an offering to the Gods ahead of battle, and the intense hatred and desire for vengeance that results almost leaps off the pages. Part of the story is also told by Orestes , their young son who witnessed this sacrifice and is later kidnapped, before running away and hiding in exile for several years. I have to admit that this section of the book was probably the least interesting, but it was good to see a different aspect to the story. The other narrator is Electra, the middle child, left behind , who feels betrayed by her father's actions and her mother's bloodthirsty response and focuses these feelings into a betrayal and vengeance of her own, using her brother Orestes along the way. Less forthright than Clytemnestra, she still made an interesting narrator as her actions were not as predictable.
Full of drama and intrigue, I really enjoyed this book which I read courtesy of Netgalley, and I would recommend it equally to fans of Colm Tóibín and those with an interest in Greek tragedy.

COLM TÓIBÍN HOUSE OF NAMES
APRIL 22, 2017
Throw out what you thought you knew of the House of Agamemnon & start here. Has Colm Tóibín been reading George R.R. Martin or sat in front of Game of Thrones? That seems as stronHOUSE OF NAMESg an influence as the Ancient Greek sources. House of Names is a tale of a king and army in thrall to Gods, bitter revenge in the throne room, young pretenders thrust into cruel exile. The language is wilfully simple … run it through some program and it might reveal this to be a young adult novel. And indeed, for a mighty portion of the book, it is.

Clytemenestra’s is the opening voice. Her daughter Iphigenia is pledged as sacrifice to the Gods so they will send winds to speed Agamemnon’s troops on their way. Why should a mother believe in Gods who would condemn her to such sorrow? She vows to be her own authority henceforth, with revenge and power as her driving forces.

Her other daughter Electra will join in on the revenge route. Both women get first person narratives of their own. Orestes has to make do with a third person narrative from his point of view. That’s symptomatic of his whole Orestes_&_Pyladesexistence – Clytemenestra ships this son into exile for his ‘safety’ – but the gayness he barely acknowledges to himself sees him surrender any voice within his household. His love for young Leander (an apparently fictional creation that links to the takes of Orestes and Pylades from the myth) is fostered in rural exile and finds silent expression in the night. How old is this Orestes? He is playing at swords with soldiers as a child when his father was alive, and five years later returns as a man. Sex, both hetero and gay, is a force in the book but one that is not comprehended and so not detailed. This is the YA aspect of the book – Orestes’ is a gay teenage love story set inside one of the most fearsome family adventures from classical literature. I found it a strong and ultimately touching read.

The story of the fall of the house of Agamemnon that begins with the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, is an old one given a new interpretation in the House of Names. The lineage of this story allows for a dramatic turn of phrase that brings blood, despair and suspicion into the language of the characters Tóibín chooses to tell the story. This makes the novel pleasingly operatic.

Clytemnestra is full of vengeful anger. She sees the world as a place deserted by the gods whose care for the affairs of men has waned, and whose influence therefore is fading too. To pray for guidance is useless; to fear acting without the favour of the gods is pathetic: the gods do not care.

The other voices, those of Electra and Orestes move within this new world very differently.

Tóibín has chosen to let the women speak for themselves, boldly proclaiming their stories in the first person. Orestes speaks in the third person, at a significant distance that suggests the way in which his story is subject to the actions of others.

While Electra takes on her mother’s world, regretting the loss of the old, but moving with agency into the new, Orestes seems to be the only human acting with a conscience rather than for personal gain. This makes him dangerous in a different way.

Clytemnestra is a monster for acting without the guidance of the gods. Orestes is equally monstrous for committing matricide, even though he acted according to others’ wishes.

The movements of old myths force certain human battles into the forefront. House of Names is all about human lineage. When characters arrive in their homes, or the homes of their relatives, they call out their own name as a way of forcing recognition. The name holds greater authority than the person proclaiming it. Hidden within these structures are questions about our human identity. Do we come from the gods? Is our life subject to their whims, to external laws, rules, morality? Are women always harbingers of evil (for Eve moves within the folds of Clytemnestra’s musings, carelessly bringing human knowledge against the gods)? Can we trust those of our own blood? Can we ever escape blood shed at our hands?

Caught in the middle of this questioning, this shift in outlook, is Orestes whose story is the most changed by Tóibín’s retelling. Orestes is the man caught in a sea of human history, forced to the head of the tide by external forces, wanting to act for the best but always cast adrift again, an observer whose only acts force him further from society. All he wants is to live at peace with those he loves. Best placed to rule for the people because he cares for them and not just himself, he is ignored despite his heritage, and not only because of his matricide but because he doesn’t have the politician’s art. The novel ends with him hoping he can regain the friendship of Leander and we hope alongside him.

If Clytemnestra’s godless world belongs to the politician, what room is there for friendship? What becomes of human morality? Tóibín’s retelling of this myth privileges the human experience over that of the gods and puts the story into a labyrinth of conflicting human interests that uses religion for its own means. In this way House of Names is a bleak modern retelling that ends with a faint hope for a future in which blood doesn’t rule your destiny. It is a thoroughly engaging read.

Different from what I expected, but a powerful read.

A retelling of the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and the murder of his wife and daughter, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia. Well worth reading.

Colm Tóibín's new novel is an exploration of the stories of Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra all of whom appears in a number of Ancient Greek myths, perhaps most famously in the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

At the heart of the novel are three murders. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek warriors setting out to attack Troy after the abduction of Helen, tricks his wife, Clytemnestra, into allowing their daughter, Iphigenia, to be sacrificed to the gods into exchange for a following wind for the ships conveying the invading army. Clytemnestra swears revenge on her husband and when he returns some years later, she murders him, with the help of her lover, Aegisthus. Subsequently, Orestes, her son, is removed from the palace, supposedly for his own safety, and held captive. He escapes from captivity, returns to the palace and kills his mother.

It takes a lot of nerve for a contemporary writer to tackle a story that generation after generation have loaded with significance. Tóibín rises to the challenge impressively and there is some wonderfully evocative writing e.g.

We are all hungry now. Food merely whets our appetite, it sharpens our teeth; meat makes us ravenous for more meat, as death is ravenous for more death. Murder makes us ravenous, fills the soul with satisfaction that is fierce and then luscious enough to create a taste for further satisfaction.

Unfortunately it is not all as good as this. There are other places where the writing loses its compelling quality and the energy drains away from the story.

Some of his narrative decisions puzzled me, such as the introduction of Leander, a friend who helps Orestes escape from captivity. In ancient versions of the story the very same role is performed by a character called Pylades. So I didn't understand why Tóibín felt it necessary to change this.

Perhaps he was highlighting the process by which stories intermingle and transform. That certainly seems to be the rationale for including The Children Of Lir, an ancient Irish story, in one of the storytelling sessions that Orestes witnesses while he is making his way homeward.

So the novel left me with unanswered questions. Nevertheless, I found it a compelling piece of storytelling and a wonderful exploration of cultural resonance.

I expected House of Names to be totally different from Toibin's other work and from everything else I read, but what I love about Toibin is still all here: beautiful descriptive writing, evocation of place, his ability to get almost uncomfortably close to his characters, and the complicated relationships between mothers and their children. I only knew a little about the story about Agamemnon, but was surprised how quickly I became engrossed in the place Toibin carved out for Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. I actually read the opening and closing passages aloud to myself and would recommend this to any reader: Clytemnestra's voice in particular is chilling when read to an empty room.

Colm Tobin revisits the recurrent subject of the mother in his novels in this reimagining of the ancient greek tragedy of the House of Atreus told in four parts. The mother here is the despised and cursed Clytemnestra, whose damning historical reputation he counters by making her more human and understandable. The retelling departs from the original where the characters actions are directed as the gods will and instead result more from natural human emotions and misjudgment. This is a story that dwells on the themes of betrayal, loss, grief, corruption, power, failure, loneliness and repression. It is told through the perspective of Clytemnestra, her son and daughter, Orestes and Electra, and the ghost of Clytemnestra.

Agamemnon betrays and sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, on her wedding day to win the Trojan war. Clytemnestra is griefstricken and seeks to assuage her desperate loss by dreaming of and planning the murder of Agamemnon. She is now the power in the land and she is aided by her lover, Aegisthus. Agamemnon returns with his precious other woman, deemed the spoils of war. Clytemnestra murders him by knifing him in the throat. Things begin to get out of hand and Orestes returns from exile. In a departure from the original story, the character of Orestes is significantly more low key and submissive, reliant on his friend, Leander, and subject to the machinations of his sister, Electra. He looks to avenge his father and kills his mother who returns as a ghost.

Where Tobin excels is in his depiction of the character of Clytemnestra who comes alive effortlessly through his prose. The language he deploys is often sublime, expressive, and vivid. He creates a doom laden picture of palace intrigue and an unsettling atmosphere. However, the narrative feels uneven and chequered in the reinterpretation of this story. The role he gives Orestes is much weaker and less authentic than that of the larger than life Clytemnestra. Tobin just does the mother figure so much better. However, overall I enjoyed reading this novel of this dysfunctional blood soaked family history. It is a timeless tale whose echoes can be heard throughout our human history time and time again. Thanks to Penguin for an ARC.

Thank you Net Galley. I was introduced to Colm Toibin's work by Net Galley, I fell in love. I miss no opportunity to read his work. This book is beautiful. I couldn't put it down once I started ( I had meant to read a chapter or so)! The basic plot of Agamemnon, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra is well known. Toibin takes it and reworks it into a powerful story with several sub-texts, with contemporary relevance. The writing as always is lyrical and yes beautiful - cliched but true. Essential reading.

This is a somewhat disappointing re-imagining, in prose form, of the story of the doomed House of Atreus, drawing primarily on Aeschylus's trilogy. Right from the start, Toibin's prose which in the past I've found delicate and precise, feels here loose and horribly self-conscious. From the opening it jarred: 'I have been acquainted with the smell of death. The sickly, sugary smell that wafts in the wind towards the rooms in this palace' - "sugary"? really? In ancient Mycenae? Honey, for sure, but sugar? More pressingly, I expected some kind of psychological realism in this novelistic treatment but there's no attempt to really make sense of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter: he just does it with no inner life driving him. Clytemnestra, too, is far weaker and foolish in this first part of the story (roughly equivalent to Aeschylus' 'Agamemnon'), quite unlike her standing in the source texts.

The second half of the tale that moves onto Orestes becomes more original: instead of Pylades, Orestes has another 'best friend', Leander. Again there are jarring moments historically such as when Leander and Orestes chat in a room where an aristocratic woman is giving birth - one of those places almost taboo to mythic Greek men.

There are some echoes of later texts here: Clytemnestra's sleepwalking inevitably recalls Lady Macbeth (and Shakespeare is thought to have drawn on Clytemnestra as well as Medea in his characterisation so there's a neatness here) and the scenes where Orestes is called to meet his mother's ghost in the palace passages reminds us of Hamlet and his father's ghost.

The ending is less patterned than in Aeschylus: where the Oresteia ends with a shift from blood-feud and personal vengeance sanctioned by the cthonic Erinyes or Furies to a move towards legal justice and state punishment presided over by Athena, Toibin's end is left more open - perhaps the only thing possible in a more sceptical modern age. All the same, this feels like a bit of a missed opportunity - it lacks the mythic grandeur and stark poetry of Aeschylus but doesn't quite work as a modern retelling with psychologically-convincing characters either.