Stories within stories – psychic archaeology: all the questing, beauty, violence and wisdom of Greek Myth. Eros and Thanatos, and the puzzling of what it means to be a human between them.

‘How young we all were: and how radiant’ … Has the man ruined everything? Will I let him?’. This is a work of is a deft, intricately woven biography with myth, archaeology, social history and etymology as weapons to carry on a journey through and towards all kinds of knowledge: wisdom, understanding, remembering, epiphany, empathy, remembrance.

We are guided through a vividly evoked childhood in Kenya and at boarding school, through a late-80s Greece still bristling with the beauty and brutality of the past, into a newly energised Albania casting off the weight of communism (via a memorable episode folding polyester clothing ‘under the fluorescent flicker’ of the Stygian basement world of Oxford Street C&A).

The author asks what knowledge we can take with us down the years and what needs to be discarded. ‘So much, ‘ she writes, ‘of what we can retrieve has survived by the most unlikely chance… we’re all so heavily invested in active forgetting, an Oedipal ignorance of the generations who were writing before us, who answered many of the questions that we’re asking’.

The central image thread is, of course, the pomegranate, which begins as a sunny, sisterly offering, ‘ripened to explosion’ and ends ‘a bomb about to go off in my hand’. As an icon of ‘blessing, new beginnings, fertility and happy relationships, healthy mourning for the dead and a recognition that life goes’, Whitworth trusts us to join her in a kind of psychic archaeology and the fascinating depths of story with which images can be charged. Persephone is always at the edge of our vision, dragged into the underworld and emerging transformed.

Without visual illustrations, it is the prose which does the work, creating a rich and spacious mental museum: there is the scholar’s but also the aesthete’s loving attention to detail of sculpture, jewellery, architecture, and also to the natural world and the worlds of the Greek myths that permeate the biography. As someone who does not just read, but is transported, passionately engaged with the characters and their journeys, she conveys this experience to the reader.

The same is true of LOOKING – a memorable moment has her in a museum in an ‘exhilarated questing dream state … a sense of being on the brink of revelation … the universe resonates through me as though my sternum were a tuning fork’. It is this passionate engagement, perhaps, which makes the young author seem not quite of this world: with half a head always in a story or an idea, she has a radiance which is also her vulnerability in the world she inhabits. Like the nymphs of mythology, her rapture, her innocent pursuit of what she loves to do – travel, read, write, eat, love - must always be vigilant, with a distressed awareness of male violence.

The labyrinthine world of ideas and words is intoxicating: in one virtuoso passage, we moves elegantly from Jung’s secret door dream, to the brain’s hypothalmus, to thalamos, the Greek word for private room, to the epithalamion sung by unmarried girls and boys. She finishes with her beloved tortoises (who also have a hypothalamus), and who crop up at slow intervals throughout this book like slow spirit animals, animating yet another compelling thread of thinking, about our ‘shared animality’. Of this gentle, vegetable-loving, carapaced creature, we are told, ‘one ancient poet calls the shell of the tortoise aiolosi an ethereal adjective related to wind, elsewhere invoking a sky shimmering with stars or the colour of smoke flushed with fire’: an example of the author’s warm and loving eye seeking, and finding beauty even in deepest distress.

There is pathos in the acquired hardness experience brings: she watches how a friend ‘functions in Athens, how she puts on that carapace of hard edges and sharp corners, takes up space, stares men down and I try to model myself on her’. But the ending brings us out into the richness of real life, shot through with the colours of experience. There is a memorably passionate and beautiful re-framing of Daphne’s rape and transformation into a plant that helps and heals generations of young women to come, and a heartbreaking final word with her girlhood love, Anne Boleyn: ‘I whisper, Stay quiet, darling. Keep your eyes down, tiptoe, feign respect, pretend you are not clever, not funny, not clear-sighted. Don’t laugh at him, or his boring music, or his ghastly dress sense’

Movingly, now a mother herself, she tries to come to terms with her own mother’s blind eye to male predators: ‘A mother’s instincts. The clink of cup and saucer, the urge to hush. That absolute maternal betrayal of a girl’s humanity; the price you pay to try to keep her safe’. Any guardian of metamorphic boys or girls will take with them her final, heartfelt enagagement with Aithra, mother-in-law of Helen of Troy and vow fiercely to tell the stories that will protect all of the young Kouros and Kore we meet on or own quests.

The author’s writing style is wonderfully poetic & descriptive; I was enthralled in the chapters about her own life, and I found that she articulated herself very well.

However, I think I would have much preferred for her to stick with the memoir genre, rather than attempting to integrate Greek myths into it. The connections between her life & the chosen myths were relatively flimsy at times, and in all honesty I found her account of them a little boring. The book definitely could have benefitted from being shortened.

I think that her writing has the potential for great emotional impact, but I didn’t enjoy this one very much.

I'm not normally drawn to non-fiction texts but the cover and the synopsis drew me in as I love all things Greek. However, I found this a strange read as it didn't fit a particular genre - it was neither a memoir or history book/classics text.
The author's writing when describing locations and her life was entertainingly descriptive and lyrical; you could almost relive her experiences but the exploration of myths was a little too highbrow for a relaxing read.