REVIEW | Yann Martel’s ‘Son of Nobody’: a Trojan horse of a different tale

Son of Nobody

Yann Martel

Canongate

You don’t pick up a book by Yann Martel expecting something linear or straightforward, and Son of Nobody is no exception. Martel won the 2001 Booker Prize for Life of Pi, which I have to confess was not a book I much cared for, but he has made a name for himself as a writer to follow.

Here his central character is Harlow Donne, a Canadian scholar of Ancient Greek who, while working towards his PhD is offered a year’s scholarship to go to Oxford University and study a collection of fragments of papyri (in fact, Martel is making reference to a genuine collection here). If he accepts, it would mean leaving his fracturing marriage and his beloved six-year-old daughter back in Canada while he pursues his dream. So that is exactly what he does.

Harlow soon claims to have discovered that one of fragments he has deciphered is part of a lost epic of the Trojan War, covering much the same ground as Homer’s The Iliad but from a different angle, and telling a rather different tale. While Homer tells of the exploits of the elite on both sides, what Harlow calls The Psoad deals with the war from the perspective of the common Argive soldier, specifically one Psoas, described as “the son of nobody”. For someone who is shuffling torn and scattered papyrus fragments, Harlow manages to construct an amazingly complete account of the war, and Psoas’s activities during it. And, like Psoas, Harlow is an ordinary man, not one of the Oxford elite who find his efforts ridiculous, not to say fantastical.

Son of Nobody is told through a very unusual way of constructing a work of fiction. Each page is divided horizontally into two: the top half is The Psoad and the bottom half is Harlow’s footnotes to the epic, combined with his own story. When I started the book, I was unsure if this was going to work – or even be readable. But it is, and The Psoad is intriguing and very entertaining. Like The Iliad, it is full of battles, gore and lists but it is also a rip-roaring tale, and in his footnotes, Harlow explains it to his aptly named daughter, Helen.

But, as I said, Harlow is also telling his own story, which, like that of the Trojan war, will be full of tragedy. I found this part of the novel less compelling than The Psoad. Harlow is an unappealing character – a failed husband, a failing academic and, ultimately, absent when his child needs him most. But nonetheless, Son of Nobody has its charms and holds the reader’s attention. And, of course, it fits into the current renewed fascination with the works of Homer which is seeing fiction take a look at the invisible characters of his ancient Greece – women and ordinary nobodies. And now film is joining in, with The Odyssey pulling them in at the box office. You don’t have to be a student of the classics to enjoy the ride.