As a boy there were two stories I wanted to be in. The first as David taking on the giant Goliath in the Valley of Elah. The second as Jason aboard the Argo setting off in search of the Golden Fleece.
In the legendary Bible story David sees his chance, takes aim with his slingshot, and bam! the story is over. Jason, on the other hand, gets a lot more on his plate. He has his throne to reclaim from the treacherous King Pelias. The death of his father must be avenged. And neither of these things can happen until he navigates the Unfriendly Sea as far as the fierce land of Colchis and somehow returns to Greece with the Golden Fleece.
Attracting me to this set-up all the more, Jason is going to have for company on his perilous voyage a veritable who’s who of the brave and valiant knocking about at the time. Perseus, the slayer of Medusa. Orpheus, the master musician. The famous brothers, Castor and Pollux. Peleus, father of Achilles. And Hercules, the greatest of all heroes. Anybody who was anybody wanted to be part of this quest. And my seven-year-old self was in thrall to this all-encompassing crew of intrepid heroes as they set about chasing sky-high waves, fending of the frightful Harpies, and steering a way through the Clashing Rocks.
With these early attempts to break free from the ho-hum of everyday existence and into the infinitely more exciting realms of the imagination, I was providing my future self with a cast of characters and a hinterland so vivid that they would smuggle themselves into the first novel I would see through to completion
I read my Greek Myths and Legends cover to cover I don’t know how many times. With an eagle eye I looked out for any movie versions of the stories. Clash of the Titans. The 300 Spartans. Jason and the Argonauts. Anything with a galley ship, sturdy oars and a long, slender hull complete with a porcelain-featured goddess dispensing wisdom in a beautiful speaking voice was enough to keep me indoors.
As soon as the movie ended I hauled myself to my upstairs room and into a copybook earmarked for such essential activity scribbled out my own sword-and-sandal adventures. I cobbled together my toy armies, arranged them into an irrepressible attacking force; specially chosen Lego pieces became my very own Spartan army tasked with defending precious territory. I took it all outside the end-of-row house we lived in, set up the players amongst the rocks and muck-holes and bindweed that passed for our back garden. And there and then re-enacted the epic narratives churning away inside my imagination.
Of course I blended the “official” narratives to suit my own purposes, accorded my favourite heroes centre stage, and happily juggled the fortunes of those deemed the lesser players in my fickle sagas. Alone in my auspicious playground, I loved sounding out the various names and mythical locations. Jason the one-sandalled man. Evil King Pelias. Medea the “Sorceress”. The sea-nymphs and the dreaded Harpies. Talus, the bronze giant. Hera, Hercules, Prometheus. The Pass of Thermopylae. I conjured a vibrant landscape in my mind’s eye. Ancient heroes and their stomping grounds – they all had significant roles in the never-ending arenas shaping my childhood.
Little did I know it then, but with these early attempts to break free from the ho-hum of everyday existence and into the infinitely more exciting realms of the imagination, I was providing my future self with a cast of characters and a hinterland so vivid that they would, in time and without my immediate awareness, smuggle themselves into the first novel I would see through to completion.
*
Fast forward 30 years. As far as early autumn 2014 to be more precise. Ithaca is solidly drafted. It’s a post-boom story, that plays out over the summer months of 2009, immediately after the so-called Celtic Tiger has gone up in smoke, and things have gone a little doolally everywhere. The setting is an unnamed Irish midlands town. It’s a first-person narrative, Jason, 11 nearly 12, very much at odds with the world he is growing into. Primarily, when we first meet him, he is at odds with the woman he is living with (ie: his vodka-swilling, swings-from-the-hip, boyfriend-entertaining mother). And so he quickly decides that he needs to find his old man. So it becomes a quest story, and in age-old fashion it quickly becomes a quest that proceeds in every direction other than the one it perhaps should.
For reasons more related to the calendar than to any structural strategising, my working draft has been completed in four separate stretches. After each stretch I submit myself and manuscript to a no-mercy debriefing from my first reader. Aoife works quickly and after she has ransacked the manuscript (for the usual gamut of plausibility concerns, unnecessary exposition, superfluous detailing and so on) she is instantly onto the myth.
“Beware the one-sandalled man,” she says to me, pointing to the early scene in my work-in-progress where Jason has his trainers whipped off his feet by Brains and No-brains McManus, the ever-present bully brothers. And I’m nodding my agreement as I am reminded of the detail from the myth that identifies Jason to his enemy, Pelias.
The second stretch contains a bar-room happy-hour buy-one-get-one-free drinkathon that is taken full advantage of by the motley collection of women from Jason’s neighbourhood. An evening of carousing ensues in the drinking den’s low-lit atmospheres, with the women cutting loose and wishing a plethora of wince-inducing discomforts upon various men in their lives. “The Island of Lemnos?” Aoife queries when we next meet up. Later, I dig out my Edith Hamilton Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, and, yes, there it is. The women-only inhabited island of Lemnos (in the myth the women have killed their husbands!) and, according to this version, the Argo’s first stop on its hazardous quest.
There was more. A lot more as I discovered upon re-reading the myths. In the original, Jason’s mother could be any one of a number of women. For my story it is Jason’s father that remains a source of speculation. The never-named “Girl” of my novel is so obviously Medea the “Sorceress” and eventual mythological wife of Jason. King Pelias (responsible for the death of Jason’s father and who has taken what is rightfully Jason’s throne) can be seen as a composite of the various men in his mother’s life with whom Jason is at loggerheads (Cop Lawless, Mario Devine, Mattie Conlon, and the assorted collection of men baying for the money Jason’s mother owes to them.) And then of course there is my youthful and troubled protagonist, named after my early hero.
Where was all this coming from? Aoife wanted to know, as she, too, continued to note the mythical references. Indeed, so enthusiastic was she in her “spotting” that I took delight in finding a reference her sharp eye had somehow missed. If you go looking for signs you will find them. In no time it seemed I had opened the lid on the infamous Pandora’s box.
Of course, the narrative of the book I was writing very much steers its own course. Into the final stretch, in particular, it seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was doing its thing without much say or interference on my part. And so, as far as the original “Jason” myth goes, it is not a tidy mirroring. Nor is it meant to be. My young narrator and his accomplice happily toss around their mythological heroes and mix in other eras and civilisations – just as I had done as a boy. Indeed, the title of my novel itself alludes to a completely different and probably more famous story.
But what I did become slowly conscious of throughout the writing, and especially the inevitable rewrites, was that the ancient stories that had fired my childhood imagination had come alive again. My post-boom modern-day narrative and its increasingly desperate protagonist were taking me back to my boyhood heroes. Back to slingshot David and intrepid Jason and indeed a host of others that I realised were still alive and well, kicking against all the odds in the backwaters of my imagination. And that, whether I was aware of it or not, the characters in these stories and the territories they had covered, were very much playing a part in the flip-flop thrust of my adult narrative, until it seemed as though I had made a return journey to that wild garden of my childhood, with its grotesque rocks and sodden puddles, and all its glorious muck and bindweed. A perilous landscape was how I now remembered it, tailor-made as a casting-off point for my young protagonist’s troubled journey.
Ithaca by Alan McMonagle is published today by Picador. It is reviewed in The Irish Times this Saturday
