Review of House of Names

House of Names
Author: Colm Toíbín
Publisher: Scribner
Date of Publication: March 2018 (my edition); first published May 2017

Ancient epics sing of a decade of war fought over possession of one woman and the pride of many men. They tell of the wrath of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus, the pride and obstinacy of Agamemnon. They tell of Agamemnon’s return home, and his murder by his own wife in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. House of Names is an imaginative adjunct to one of our oldest and most retold tales from the perspective of some if its lesser-known victims and perpetrators. This particular story begins with the rage and grief of Clytemnestra, a mother deceived, bereft, and abandoned, and spins out the story of herself and her children Electra and Orestes, a family twisted and wrecked by that rage and grief.
What makes this story so darkly credible is the corrosiveness of suffering and the relentless brutality. There are brutalities of all scales, from Agamemnon’s murder to the particular methods of rape and execution. This is not a happy story. It is not meant to be. The characters’ motives and circumstances impel madness and martyrdom. They give particular shape to Orestes, a child when his sister (Iphigenia) is sacrificed. Forgotten by a mother hell bent on infinite revenge, he is forced prematurely into manhood by the necessities of survival. He must kill, but he also clings to an ill-fated faith in love and companionship. It makes him likeable, and it also dooms him to obscurity because he is resistant to partaking in the cruelty that drives the power structures surrounding him. The anonymity that shapes Orestes’ adult life, and the impossibility of him experiencing normal, relatively easy partnership after the rending of his family, show the cost of lust for blood and power in ways both sharp and tender.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of this story is cohesively developing a family so irreparably damaged, untrusting, and unforgiving. Clytemnestra’s backstory and the sacrifice of Iphigenia are recounted—in a somewhat explanatory, unsatisfyingly declarative manner—and then she is developed into a character terrifying and terrifyingly naive. She fails to protect the family she kills for, including herself, and she tries to fix her grief and helplessness by committing atrocities similar to the ones for which she murdered her husband. These qualities make her complex, and parallel other characters of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but they are developed somewhat independently from the stories of her children. Electra and Orestes’ lives are not self-enclosed, but their stories are self-enclosed. 
This is a story worth reading for the intention, even if ancient myths do not compel you. Different from its Homeric progenitors, this story is stripped of gods and their vagaries, leaving only human characters to bear the full weight of their darkness. The Odyssey is in many ways a story of human folly and visicissitudes of want and ambition. House of Names follows this thread of self-exploration, breaking from the way in which the epic is told but perhaps not why it is told. The characters are connected mostly by shared death and bitterness; that doesn’t make for an easy story to develop or read, but it is a story worth telling – and heeding.