Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an extraordinary work: a retelling of Greek myth by a Roman poet, whose unifying theme is the act of change. The invocation that begins the poem explains: “My spirit compels me to tell of forms changed into new bodies”, and Metamorphoses has inspired visual artists from Bernini to Picasso, as well as poets from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes. Zachary Mason now adds his name to an intimidatingly long list. He should be used to that, though, having reworked Homer for his wonderful debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, in which he reimagined Odysseus’s story from multiple perspectives.
Sadly, the rigour that thrilled readers of his first book is missing for much of this one. Too many chapters – those concerning the Trojan war, in particular – feel like offcuts from his taut debut. There, Mason dealt beautifully with Polyphemus, the cyclops blinded by Odysseus, in a chapter told from the cannibalistic monster’s viewpoint. It was a clear homage to “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges, which tells the story of Theseus from the perspective of the cannibalistic Minotaur. In Metamorphica, the third chapter is a woolly version of an earlier part of Polyphemus’s life, when he loves the sea nymph Galatea and kills her beloved Acis in a fit of jealous rage. Mason retains the jealousy and the slaughter, but omits the part where Galatea turns her lover into a river god, the metamorphosis that renders the story Ovidian. If there is no metamorphosis (and the only thing in Mason’s version that comes close is Polyphemus carving Acis’s dead face into rock, like a bronze age Mount Rushmore), then what is the reason for the story’s inclusion?
The question arises again with the tale of Daphne, who tries to elude Apollo’s advances, prays for assistance, and finds herself turned into a tree. Bernini’s famous sculpture shows leaves sprouting from her fingers as Apollo grabs at her, unwilling to give up even as she shapeshifts. In Mason’s deeply pedestrian reworking, there is no such transformation: after their encounter, she continues life as before. “Now other ordinarily pretty girls run laughing through the same wood with Apollo on their heels.” Try as one might to see the act of turning a good story into a dull one as itself a metamorphosis, there seems no reason to tell the story at all in this form, certainly not in this collection.
Mason’s talent flashes through at times. In a lovely description of Athena comforting Calypso on her island shore, for example: “Athena is sitting beside her, and for once, her raptor’s eyes are kind.” The predatory nature of the goddess who has Odysseus as her favourite is neatly caught, and the allusion to her Homeric epithet, “glaukopis Athena” (which is usually translated as “Athena of the gleaming eyes”, or similar, but literally means “owl-eyed”) is delightful.
There are also some tantalising glimpses of what the book might have been, as when Phaedra watches Theseus embracing her older sister, Ariadne. “His eyes were cold as he stroked her neck and I could see him wondering how long he had to hold her, and I wanted to warn her, but I knew she wouldn’t listen.” His version of Narcissus and Echo makes a genuinely interesting change. Instead of falling in love with his own reflection, Narcissus (here recast as a Wildean playboy) falls for Echo, a girl who looks so like him that she is almost his mirror image. In the end, it is her reflection he sees looking back at him.
But this is a collection of missed opportunities: in Hades, Orpheus discovers that Eurydice and he had little in common. “She’d been less a lover than a trope of literature,” he realises. Cute as this might be in isolation, altogether too many of Mason’s women are virtually mute and concomitantly characterless, from Galatea to Alcestis. In this, he falls far short of Ovid, who was undeniably a sex pest in life, but nonetheless one of the great writers of women.
The book is given a veneer of complexity by its chapter headings and footnotes, but they are inconsistent and occasionally inaccurate. A note on page 92 explains that “the mathematicians of antiquity were familiar with irrational numbers”, although it would be an odd reader who would quibble about historical accuracy in this one case when Mason often embraces anachronism, happily having bronze age characters playing chess, or “steepling” fingers well over a millennium before Jesus existed, let alone a church steeple.
Later, the same reader is expected to know enough about Greek myth to realise that a golden-haired youth with a snake twirling round his staff is Hermes Psychopompos, the god who accompanies the dead to the Underworld. The note on the Aeneid chapter explains that Aeneas founded Rome, which isn’t the case: his son founded Alba Longa, whose priestly line would eventually produce Romulus, the founder of Rome. Metamorphica is less than the sum of its parts: a mishmash of Greco-Roman myth, without the precision or beauty that Ovid brought to the same subject and that Mason has shown us before.
• Natalie Haynes’s The Children of Jocasta is published by Picador. Metamorphica by Zachary Mason (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). To order a copy for £13.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
