The Fates

By Rosie Garland
Quercus/Paperback/388 pages/$36 from Amazon SG (amzn.to/4c1zPll)
3 stars

Divine Might: Goddesses In Greek Myth

By Natalie Haynes
Harper Perennial/Paperback/261 pages/$21.71 from Amazon SG (amzn.to/3KEKYfY)
4 stars

The remaking of Greek myths has powered a veritable cottage industry in publishing in the past decade. Leading the charge with these remade stories are women writers, who zero in on the oft-muted voices of Greek women – be they mortal or immortal – in the legends that have shaped Western culture. 

These two books are just the latest offerings in the stampede. 

Quercus is trumpeting Rosie Garland’s The Fates as “a spellbindingly original mythical retelling for 2024”. What it is, really, is a very prettily written but often flat story that spends most of its time with Meleager and Atalanta rather than the titular Moirai, the three sisters known colloquially as the Fates. 

The book starts off promisingly enough with a prologue by the trio, who lament that “we have been silenced and slandered”. The gauntlet is thrown: “For the first time we shall speak in our own voices, and tell the plain truth.” 

So, Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who measures out the length of existence; and Atropos, who decides how and when life ends, are to tell their side of the story. So far, so promising.

Barely five pages in, however, and the focus switches to the huntress Atalanta and Calydonian prince Meleager. The Fates predict that the latter will live only as long as a piece of wood in the family hearth burns, upon which his mother Althea snatches the log from the fire to tuck away for safekeeping. 

Meleager and Atalanta’s stories take up almost a quarter of the book before the narrative returns to the Fates. There is an awkward shift in perspective from the omniscient narrator back to the Fates’ first-person voice. The change is even more jarring as the latter speak as mortal children, who have forgotten their true identities, under the care of the goddess Themis. 

As it turns out, the Moirai are hiding from Zeus as part of a bigger scheme to free mankind from the binds of fate.

Intriguing as this premise is, it is too buried in the multiple plot strands to gain much traction. 

Garland gets all tangled up in Meleager’s dysfunctional relationship with his mother and half-brother, Atalanta’s fluid sexuality, and Zeus as the ultimate toxic male. 

Individually, there are moments in these subplots where certain characters and scenarios resonate with the contemporary zeitgeist. Atalanta’s relationships with Antiklea and Meleager, for example, are a sympathetic depiction of the intricacies of eros (sexual passion) and philia (deep friendship) that defy easy social categorisations. 

But the attempt at updating Zeus to 21st-century norms just ends up reducing him to the caricature of a moustache-twirling villain who behaves more like a spoilt child throwing tantrums rather than a terrifyingly fickle immortal power.

Garland’s patchy effort highlights one of the biggest pitfalls of remaking Greek gods for a modern audience. Severing these gods from their original Greek context by layering modern sensibilities and expectations on them can rob them of their primal power. 

This is where Natalie Haynes, author of multiple Greek remakes including 2019’s A Thousand Ships and 2022’s Stone Blind, has the edge over Garland.

Haynes read classics at Cambridge, which means she is also conversant in Latin and ancient Greek. Her training, esoteric as it is in the modern world, means she is more attuned to the social, cultural, political and religious contexts of these stories which once carried devotional weight with an entire civilisation. 

Divine Might, unlike The Fates, is not a work of fiction. It is instead a collection of easily digestible, oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny and almost ridiculously entertaining essays focusing on the female demographic of the Greek pantheon. 

Fans who have followed her Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics series for BBC Radio 4 (and also available online www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b077x8pc) will find this book familiar. The chapters are culled from her radio scripts and lightly edited for print, but many of the jokes remain.

Haynes’ conversational style of writing helps distill and translate a topic that can sometimes be seen as dull and irrelevant. She preps the readers on the first page, warning: “Homeric gods are petty, aggressive and routinely obnoxious.” 

Then, she proceeds to take them on a whirlwind tour of not just the stories of Greek goddesses, but also works in multiple engaging detours into the poetry and plays of both Greek and Roman writers, as well as the works of art created by the Greeks and Western civilisations that have followed since. 

There are snappy asides that will keep the reader going. While discussing the muses, Haynes observes dryly: “Picasso described women as ‘machines for suffering’, so it’s perhaps not a surprise that he seemed happy to contribute so fully to their unhappiness.”

Haynes, a self-confessed “recovering comedian”, has an abiding love of the classics, and her evangelising passion is tempered by her healthy irreverence and surprisingly wide-ranging pop culture knowledge. 

The chapter on Aphrodite, for example, opens with Lady Gaga’s appearance on the Muppets’ 2013 Thanksgiving special, singing her song Venus.

It detours to Italian painter Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century classic painting Birth Of Venus, tracing the origins of the pose to fourth-century Greek sculptor Praxiteles before referencing American actress Uma Thurman’s appearance in the recreation of Botticelli’s work in the 1988 movie The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.

It is enough to give readers a serious case of cultural whiplash. This happily egalitarian and erudite mishmash is a joy to read and, this reviewer, for one, appreciates that Haynes trusts that readers will be able to follow her narrative. 

Her wide-ranging references also prove that classics are far from dead, and that their characters and tropes have a surprisingly lively afterlife in contemporary culture. 

If you like this read: Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus Volume 1 (Del Rey, 384 pages, $27.90 from Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/45nKmF9), a sassy, whip-smart updating of the romance between Hades, god of the underworld, and Persephone, the goddess of spring, which began life as a webtoon and snagged a much-deserved 2022 Eisner award for Best Web Comic.