I don’t think I fully realised this book was set in the pandemic (which I have been avoiding books on) but once I pushed past this, the book had a really interesting premise. I have always had an interest in myths since doing classics at school and liked the way the author captured desperation of lockdown through different fortune telling and divination.
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Requested this expecting a feminist fictional rewrite of ancient myth. Instead it is a Covid-19 memoir with melodrama rather than myth, in a poor imitation of Sarah Moss. Strongly suggest the title and cover are re-worked prior to publication so as not to mislead others.

Delphi is a novel about a woman fixated on ideas of prophecy whilst also living through COVID lockdowns in London, trying to keep her family going and navigate through the new normal whilst having thoughts of the classics. The narrator, a Classics lecturer and translator in her forties, documents her life as the pandemic hits, as a year changes everything, whilst she tries to look after her son and deal with the increasing gap between her and her husband, whose lockdown seems very different to hers. At the same time, through her academic interests in prophecy she becomes intrigued by future telling: tarot, astrology, I Ching, etc. Through the uncertainty of her present, she looks for guidance to the future.

The conceit of this novel—short chapters each titled by a kind of prophecy, real or imagined—is one I like, and I appreciate that this isn't a modern retelling of myth, but rather a book that takes inspiration from Classics as a character navigates the present day. There's a lot of references throughout, often to Greek and Roman literature and myth, but not only that, and again, this was something I enjoyed, though at times there were some slightly forced comparisons, as anything combining the modern day and the past is likely to do. Prophecy was less important than I expected going into the book: I was assuming that it would be more stand out, even almost supernatural, but by the end it felt more like natural worry and foreshadowing, though the protagonist didn't really bring this together.

There's not much plot in the novel, apart from a few dramatic events later on, but it is mostly a COVID novel, similar (though not in plot or structure) to Sarah Moss' The Fell, though I found Delphi was a bit more descriptive and rehashing what happened to a character during lockdowns. There were a few details that didn't sit right (mostly notably, introducing a non-binary side character by what they 'used to be' gender-wise), but I think a lot of people will like the level of pandemic detail in a book that is now at least a year ago, real-time-wise, and might find it cathartic. For me, I found that the book didn't quite capture me, maybe because a lot of it just felt like describing a fairly privileged pandemic everyday, and the prophecy stuff didn't quite affect the narrative enough, despite being key to the structure.

Maybe Delphi is one for people who find the protagonist more relatable or enjoy the level of engagement with real life lockdown, but it wasn't quite for me as I just didn't care about the protagonist. I did like the Classics and the concept of focusing on kinds of future telling, but it didn't quite come together for me enough. Lots of people will probably find it powerful, though, and a different way to explore a present that has been terrible for many.

Delphi by Clare Pollard is about a Classics academic and her family's experience of the pandemic and her attempt to make sense of it through her interest in the history of prophecies. I think this will be one of the books of the year - Pollard is one to watch.

Clare Pollard is an editor, journalist and teacher as well as an author of poems (for which she is best known), plays, non-fiction books and poetry translations (including of Ovid) and a frequent poetry prize judge. This is her debut novel.

When I saw the title of the novel I thought it was in the recent genre of feminist novelistic retellings/interpretations of Greek myths, but while there is a very strong element of Greek and Roman mythology running through the novel it also has in my view in the immediacy of its writing strong elements of Olivia Laing’s “Crudo” or (perhaps even more pertinently) Jenny Offill’s “Weather”, and in its exploration of political events as they develop there are elements of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet.

It will I think be seen as one of the key examples of the relatively nascent genre of books exploring COVID not indirectly via dystopia (of which there are many excellent examples such as Hanya Yanagihara, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Emily St John Mandel, Sarah Hall ) but by direct and relatable experience (perhaps only Sarah Moss with “The Fell” has attempted this so far in literary fiction).

But over all of that, and returning to the book’s title, this is fundamentally a book which explores the way in which humans over the years have tried to reduce the feeling of chaos and entropy in their lives and societies by the arts of prophecy and prediction in all their forms.

The narrator is a 45 year old part time Classics lecturer at a London University, part time translator of novels (from German), married (to Jason – an ex-DJ who works for a Charity) and with a ten year old son Xander (who suffers from various allergies and skin conditions).

And it is set over the 2020-early 2021 period both with all of the developments of COVID in the UK (for example the initial threat of the disease, the sudden import from Italy, hoarding, masks, leaving groceries, queues in supermarket carparks, the lockdowns and Tiers, the chaos that was Christmas 2020); the common personal impacts (for example juggling WFH with two parents, Zoom-fatigue, public school home-schooling in all its disasters, excessive drinking, binge watching TV, COVID privilege guilt – the need to apologise for having a garden) and with everything playing out in public (for example the failures and scandals of PPE and Test and Trace, the murder of Sarah Everard and the failures of the Met Police, BLM, Trump in his various phases, climate change, the surprisingly UK successful vaccination programme)

The book has a distinctive structure – some 60 or so chapters, typically of say 2-3 pages but varying in length from a few lines to 5-10 pages, almost all of the chapters featuring the name of a type of prophecy. So a few examples – chosen purely at random: Rhapsodomancy: Prophecy by Poetry; Stichomancy: Prophecy by Lines Chosen at Random; Ovomancy: Prophecy by Eggs; Chresmomancy: Prophecy by the Ravings of a Madman and so on.

And the chapters – told in the present tense in an accessible but intelligent prose mix all of the above with the narrator’s developing family and interior life and with her musings on the different forms of prophecy. The later are sometimes linked to current events (Ovomancy captures grocery hoarding, Chresmomancy the shortest chapter just says “Trump is still demanding recounts, so that’s a bad sign”), often to the narrator’s life but there are two other distinct elements – her Classics inspired musings on the beliefs of the ancients (the role of the Delphi prophetess is as you would expect central here) and her own lockdown dabblings in Tarot, Psychics and i-Ching.

And just to add an additional element – the narrator draws on her translation background to discuss various concepts captured in German compound words.

The overall effect is a very distinctive book which is both easy to read and through provoking.

I probably had two main criticisms of the book both of which I think were linked to the desire to make the link to mythology.

The first was that for a book about prophecy there was no coverage of either the role of prophecy in the foundation and continuing practice of monotheistic religions (the focus here all on polytheistic religions of the Greeks and Romans and modern superstitions), or of the way in which scientfic interpretation combined with mathematical modelling has taken over most of what was for millennia thought only to be accessible by some form of prophecy. As someone involved in a church where prophecy is practiced and who belongs to a profession dedicated to modelling of future uncertainty this meant the book felt diminished. And for a book that covers climate change and is entirely centred COVID it seemed odd to exclude the role of mathematical modelling combined with climatology and epidemiology in our understanding of both issues. But I think the author was more interested in prophecies which built on methods accessed by the ancients.

And secondly for a book light on plot (no bad thing at all) what plot there was seemed slightly melodramatic to me – particularly the double drama at the book’s ending, although I think this was an attempt to bring in some mythological dramatic themes.

On one level, this is the story of 2020: through the female narrator's present tense, journal-alike writings we relive life in London (and other places?) from the first emergence of the virus through lockdown, gradual re-opening, the tiers, the cancellation of Christmas and the hope of vaccines alongside anti-vaxxers and covid conspiracy theorists.

It's all here: the WFH, the lack of space with couples squabbling over room to Zoom, the drinking at six to mark the putative end of the working day and us all becoming hobbyist cocktail-makers; home-schooling and delivering lectures and conference papers online with the washing drying over radiators in the background. And the outside world operating in tandem: BLM, Sarah Everard, Tory sleaze in channelling money for Test and Trace and other contracts to cronies; Trump, of course, and British government attempts to stop legitimate protests against racism, climate change and violence against women.

But on another level, this is really about chaos and human attempts to try to control the messy business of living. The narrator is a classicist researching a book on prophecy in the ancient world, and draws astute parallels between all the paraphernalia of ancient augury and our modern attempts to predict the future from astrology and tarot to political polls (the latter notoriously proven wrong in the last handful of years).

The writing is bright and smart, easy and engaging, but there's more going on here than merely a kind of contemporary Bridget Jones. It feels therapeutic to relive the recent past and process it at some distance - but this is also about how life happens moment to moment, and all we can do is live it in all its messy uncontrollability.

And is that going to be the most striking book cover of 2022?!