This post was originally published on Audible.ca.
Yann Martel has been a cornerstone of Canadian literature ever since the 2002 publication of his Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi, which had a global impact and has been adapted into a blockbuster movie directed by Ang Lee and a stage show with life-sized animal puppetry that won five Olivier Awards and three Tony Awards.
Now, Martel returns with his new novel, Son of Nobody, an inventive retelling of the Trojan War that shifts the focus from kings to the common man. The story follows Psoas of Midea, a low-born soldier, and is framed through the discovery of an ancient manuscript by Harlow Donne, a Canadian scholar at Oxford University. Structured uniquely—with the epic poem at the top of the page and Donne’s personal, often heartbreaking footnotes below—narrators Robin Wilcock and Aaron Willis alternate between these two distinct voices, inviting listeners to experience the "split-page" structure in a distinct way with their dual narration.
Martel's latest explores universal themes of homesickness, grief, and the enduring nature of myth, and the author generously shares more about his career-long obsession with how we construct truth from the fragments of the past.
Jerry Portwood: It's been 10 years since your last novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, which was about another long journey. Are we detecting a theme?
Yann Martel: Not that I'm aware of. Each book for me is a new idea, a new exploration. But some themes come back: What is fact? What is fiction? How do we read life? Is there anything beyond rationality, and if so, what? I could also say that any story involves a journey of sorts, whether the journey of a body or the journey of a soul.
The ancient stories never go out of style (and we're even getting another movie adaptation of The Odyssey). Yet, unlike Homer's The Iliad, which you said inspired you and focuses on kings and heroes, your new book focuses on Psoas, an ordinary, everyday soldier. Why did you think it was essential to share this perspective?
Because we live—or we're supposed to live—in a time where everyone matters, every single person. That's the ideal of democracy, of human rights—and of religions. In a functioning democracy, as well as a functioning religion, the most "ordinary" person, the lowest on the educational scale, on the economic ladder, the most marginal person by reason of gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on, MATTERS. I believe in that.
That attitude of egalitarianism led to the rise of Athenian democracy, and it should continue to prevail today. I detest excess of privilege. Our world is being destroyed by the hoarding of wealth and the perversions of greed. Okay, I'll stop my rant now. We're good.
We've seen many authors reimagine ancient stories in contemporary novels to explore modern-day social, psychological, and cultural complexities. Why do you think this impulse persists?
It happens especially with the Greek myths because they're so plastic, so easily moldable into something that speaks to us today. I think that has to do with the Greek frame of mind. You can see why Ancient Greek philosophy arose, because the Ancient Greeks had a natural tendency to ask questions. The Ancient Greeks in The Iliad, that is, around 1000 BC, were asking questions about the meaning of life—Why are we here? How should we behave? What is the meaning of life? What is love?—while everyone else in the rest of Europe was just picking their noses sitting in a cave, living lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short on insights.
The Greek myths are incredibly imaginative—that is, hugely entertaining—while also being amazingly insightful about the human psyche. No surprise, then, that we continue to go back to them again and again, because in looking at them we're looking at ourselves.
"I love audiobooks. They bring us back to storytelling, indeed, to language, as it first was: oral and fleeting, for the ears rather than the eyes."
As a follow-up, any favourites of your own?
Gilgamesh, in a retelling by the poet Derrek Hines. The epic of Gilgamesh is another ancient mirror, this time from ancient Mesopotamia, older than anything, that continues to shine without a blemish. It asks questions about death that were asked then, by King Gilgamesh, and we still ask today. Hines gives it a dazzling modern spin. It's a great book.
All of your books touch on mythic themes as well as ideas of spirituality and the subjective nature of truth. How does Son of Nobody echo or add to your views about the emotional nourishment humans need to transcend harsh physical realities?
I believe in what I call magical thinking, which is the natural mode of art and religion. Both art and religion go beyond the evident, the material, the obvious, the empirical, the factual, exploring the depths of human existence that can only be plumbed using the imagination. In Son of Nobody, I explore some of the foundational myths of the West. These myths grapple with precisely that, how we transcend the harsh realities of life: pain, illness, injustice, death.
Not only do you construct a new ancient myth centred around the Trojan War, you have a contemporary scholar who discovers these "lost relics" and reflects on what the story means to him. Why was that point of view important to your overall narrative?
Because I wanted to establish a parallel, since, after all, the point of exploring the past is to see what it has to say about the present. They're connected, yesterday being today only a day ago. Sometimes it's reassuring to see that the banister we have our hand on as we climb up (or down) the stairs of Time has been there a long time, that it's well-established, that perhaps we're going somewhere.
Those ancient tales were part of a vital oral tradition, what hopes do you have for the audio narration of Son of Nobody and for future listeners?
I love audiobooks. They bring us back to storytelling, indeed, to language, as it first was: oral and fleeting, for the ears rather than the eyes. Don't get me wrong: I love language for the eyes. If I didn't, I'd be out of a job. But there's something exhilarating about hearing a story, being asked to be present with our blind, far-seeing ears, our brains awake like a hare on the alert.
Concerning Son of Nobody, well, I wonder how a book divided into half-pages, alternations of epic verse on the top, footnotes on the bottom, will land on the ears of listeners. They better have their bunny ears fully pricked!
