Over the past decade or so, the Modern Retelling has become an established and lucrative literary sub-genre: Preti Taneja has done King Lear, Pat Barker The Iliad, Mark Haddon Pericles, Percival Everett Huckleberry Finn, among endless examples, all themselves indebted to an original idea by James Joyce. The usual approach is either to keep the retelling in the source’s era but change the perspective (for instance, to highlight the sexism, racism or other prejudices of the precursor) or to transpose it to the present day. James Russell’s distinctive contribution reworks Virgil’s first-century BCE Roman epic the Aeneid, setting it inventively in 1959, and – with admirable commercial disdain – not converting it into a novel but keeping it as long-form poetry.
In 1959, hero Aeneas has become WW2 vet Ed, his son Ascanius is unassuming-but-clever Ned, his dad Anchises is ladies’ man Leslie and his goddess-mum Venus is posh Lady Vera. The Troy they have to flee is a Richmond almshouse, Dido’s Carthage is a Wiltshire pub, and they move West not over the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas but along the Great West Road. Italy is Bristol.
The new poem’s bathetic tenor carries through to its themes and details. Piety is superstition, fate is chance, prayers are phone-calls, shipwreck is car breakdown, the Trojan horse is a woodwormy clothes horse, Laocoön’s serpents are dressing-gown cords, the war is class-based street aggro, and the title itself recalls a Fifties’ small business. The book’s blurb says that readers need know nothing about theAeneid to enjoy it, though to test that claim would need a different reviewer. I had great pleasure (sad, I know) identifying, say, Eviades as Evander, ‘Piggy’ Palfrey as Pygmalion, Neil and Ewan as Nisus and Euryalus and Ann-Marie as Andromache. It helps that there’s lots of wit and imagination in the transformations: the Sibyl is a receptionist, Vulcan an engineering lecturer, and Camilla a newspaper columnist called… Camilla.
There’s charm too in the late-fifties setting – Dennis Lotis, Workers’ Playtime, Senior Service, The Goon Show, Steve Reeves in Hercules, winkle-pickers and beetle-crushers – despite a few glitches (or obscure jokes?): Desmond the Dachshund? Monte Casino? ‘well-healed’? Vanden ‘Plass’ Princess? The narrative voice ranges widely; sometimes chatty (‘Time to say some words about the Goram Fair before/ we return to Turner & his plans’), sometimes contemplative (‘Is courage a virtue?/ Not necessarily.’), sometimes academic (‘unless there are the discourses of others/ explicitly marked’), often gently comic
Ed is away; Ned holds the fort.
He holds it by paying his favourite records
whenever he wants to as loud as he likes
and occasionally vanishing altogether as the free verse mutates to playscript. The language feels era-appropriate (billet, nelly, gelt…), and the geography’s precise even down to the many real pubs.
The plot does get tweaked a bit, as you might expect. There are no Gods. Anchises dies in Carthage, not Drepanum. Aeneas and Lavinia have an actual date. Anita (Amata) doesn’t commit suicide, nor does Dana (Dido), whom Ed doesn’t see again in the Underworld – he merely encounters a statue while having a kind of bad trip. The prevailing downbeat naturalism also means Ed doesn’t meet the ghost of his father, only his dad’s (living) twin. Chapter Five feels a bit shoehorned, since Leslie’s secret thousands of pounds never get explained nor does the reason for his will’s bizarre conditions. But most radically, this retelling softens the Aeneid’s famously brutal and abrupt ending with a happy epilogue in which Ed gets away with killing Turner (Turnus), while Patsy (Pallas) revivifies, and Ned turns into a tech superwhizz and marries her. Well, it’s a far nicer outcome than a thousand years of militarist Roman imperium, and perfectly apt for this fun and rather original read.
Guy Russell 28th November 2024
