SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
How does a certain life become an epic? Yann Martel's new novel, "Son Of Nobody," centers around the scholarly efforts and family life of Harlow Donne. He's a Canadian classicist who comes across a pottery shard that leads him to a lost epic tale of the Trojan War. But unlike many epics, it's not about a king or a demigod. It's about a commoner, Psoas of Midas. If I could ask you to read, Mr. Martel.
YANN MARTEL: Prologue.
(Reading) Muse, have you forgotten him? Psoas was his name. Is he to stay in the gloom of Hades, nevermore to see the honey light of the world? What did he do to deserve this chill fate? Let me sing his song. Then we'll see where he should stay, whether in the soaring cave called the mortal mouth, whence a flutter of the tongue will give him glory, or in that dank, dark place, silent and bone-chilling, where unhappy creatures move about like shadows. Psoas, I say, was his name, and he was my friend.
SIMON: And Yann Martel, author of the worldwide bestseller and Booker Prize-winning novel "Life Of Pi," joins us from the studios of the CBC in Saskatoon. Thanks so much for being with us.
MARTEL: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: Novel is presented in two tracks of half pages. Now, above the line are fragments of the document - "The Psoad," the lost epic - and below, footnotes and scenes from the family life of Harlow Donne. Why the two-track storytelling?
MARTEL: Just 'cause it was finally the best way to tell the story. I didn't want to anchor in just one time frame, the present, with incessant flashbacks to this lost epic. That would very much put it in the background. I wanted each to have its own space, exist on its own terms. So I thought of this device of having the top half of the page with these lost fragments, fragments of this lost epic tradition, and in the bottom half, footnotes. I like the idea of giving a footnote a starring role 'cause, as I say, at one point, we're all footnotes to a greater story. Our little lives finally add up to great lives collectively. And just very simply, it was the easiest way to tell the story. It allowed me to have "The Psoad" exist on its own terms 3,000 years ago and, at the bottom half of the page, to have commentary on it from a modern perspective.
SIMON: Is there a class consciousness in "The Psoad," this account of the Trojan War, that's less visible, say, in Homer?
MARTEL: Absolutely. One thing that's striking when you read Homer's "Iliad" is that everyone - with one exception, everyone who speaks is some blue blood, is either a king, a queen, a god or a goddess, a prince or a princess. Only once does a commoner speak, and that's Thersites. And he, in a more violent way, does what Achilles does. He questions the social order. He rails against Agamemnon, saying, why are we here? What do we common people, common soldiers, have to gain from this? We've been here for 10 years at an enormous loss of life, and for what gain?
And instead of all the soldiers saying, yes, you're right - let's get out of here - Odysseus comes over and promptly beat him. And inexplicably, everyone else cheers along, and Thersites is vilified as being the ugliest man in the Greek army. He's sort of a caricature. But to a modern reader, it makes complete sense. Why indeed would a common Greek soldier, you know, spend 10 years at war - all this to save one man's wife? We also today are ruled by elites that care nothing for us, that are, you know, governed by greed and predatory behavior, i.e. Jeffrey Epstein, for example. And what should we do? Surely, we should rise up, like Thersites or like Psoas, and rail against these elites and take back the narrative.
SIMON: Harlow Donne gets an offer from Oxford to pursue his life-making project. But there's a cost to his family, isn't there?
MARTEL: Yeah. The point of looking into the past is to get illumination onto the present. So I wanted to establish this parallel, 'cause it's very pertinent, between this Trojan War, this siege where people are endlessly waiting and ruminating on that waiting, and today's world. And today's - and so the best parallel to me between a war and today would not be another war. It would be, but in fact, a war writ small, which is a couple falling apart. So the Trojan War featured the Greeks and the Trojans. And in the modern parallel, you have a couple, Harlow Donne and Gail, who are falling apart, and their daughter's name is Helen. And so I wanted a parallel there.
Just as the Greeks leave Greece and fight at Troy, Harlow leaves Canada to go to England to, in a sense, fight his own war and hopefully have a quick win. Whatever he gains is at a tremendous cost, just as with the Greeks. They allegedly, putatively, won the war against the Trojans, but at an enormous cost that finally led to - the Mycenaean civilization collapsed and the Greek Dark Ages started, which lasted for 300 years.
SIMON: A family emergency brings Harlow and Gail together in loss. But it also sharpens their split, doesn't it?
MARTEL: It does. Harlow is - you know, has this fellowship at Oxford and is driven by this passion. It's not necessarily an obsession. It's this passion with this discovery. Imagine you're Howard Carter and you've just discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb. Would you then - you know, you might likely be late for supper that evening 'cause you're so taken by this amazing discovery. In the same way, he's - you know, he's discovered this lost Trojan War tradition, of which there were many. So he's so drawn by it, but he's also reminded of his daughter. And so in a sense, he dedicates his work to her. So, yes, there's a tension and a divide and a loss, but he clings to this thing because it's a gift to her. And there's nothing he can do about what happens to her. Like with the Greeks who die but hope to have glory, in a sense, he's hoping to bestow glory on his daughter.
SIMON: Does Psoas come to like war? Does it give him a sense of purpose?
MARTEL: Well, you certainly get that in "The Iliad." You have people who are raging to fight. When Achilles returns to the battle after the death of Patroclus, yes, he's raging to fight. But war makes you go mad. You see that with Alexander the Great - just an aside - who eventually got - went insane with the violence. Psoas clearly does that. And in his war-weary madness, he decides to take on a prince of Troy, one of the 50 sons of Priam. He decides to fight him, which would make no sense at the time. As a common soldier, he'd be poorly equipped, poorly trained. But in his sort of madness to get things over with, Psoas takes on Prince Mestor of Troy.
SIMON: There's a scholarly discussion at one point where someone observes...
(Reading) There's a good reason why ordinary people are forgotten by history. We are all hopeful and humdrum.
Is there such thing as an ordinary person?
MARTEL: When I say ordinary, I include myself as that. I'm a child of middle-class parents. They happened to be diplomats, so we saw the world, but they were civil servants. They worked for the government, had, you know, average salaries. I went to public schools. And I very much feel that those footnotes are the essence of life. The grand epic is collectively built, just exactly as Homer's "Iliad" was recounted not by one single genius, let's say, like Dante's "Divine Comedy," which was the product of a single mind. Greek epic is the result of hundreds and hundreds of bards who collectively, you know, gathered all those footnotes and built something grand, put something grand on this pedestal called, in this case, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." But it's all those - accumulation of those quieter voices. I very much believe in those quieter voices. I think that's where the richness of the human experience is to be found.
SIMON: Yann Martel - his new novel, "Son Of Nobody." Thank you so much for being with us.
MARTEL: My pleasure, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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