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.