Myths made modern

Margaret Atwood's take The Odyssesy is self-consciously jokey, but Jeanette Winterson's retelling of the story of Heracles is more successful, writes Caroline Alexander

'Myth,' Karen Armstrong writes in her short treatment of the subject that serves as the introduction to Canongate's new series, "is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence." Myth is rooted in "the fear of extinction" and is accompanied by sacrifice. "All mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it." This is powerful stuff and sets the bar very high for the publisher's ambitious undertaking, a retelling of old myths by contemporary writers. The concept is valuable and valid. The survival of these myths, some of them immemorially ancient, is precisely due to the fact that they have been readdressed, readjusted and reinterpreted through the ages. The relationship between people and the mythic events they celebrate in story and ritual has always been fluid.

A Short History of Myth is a handy stand-alone overview of the ever-evolving partnership between myth and man from Paleolithic times to the present. Succinct and cleanly written, it is hugely readable and, in its journey across the epochs of human experience, often moving. For Paleolithic man, it was the hunt, the horror and elation of a kill, the blessing of lifeblood spilled that organized belief and ritual. From about 8,000 B.C., following the successful establishment of agriculture, the earth and all toil and hazard associated with its cultivation became the organizing concern. Later urbanisation placed the old gods at some remove from daily life, and historical personages (like Gilgamesh) and events encroached on the mythic domain once exclusive to primordial gods and heroes. The Axial Age, from around 800 to 200 B.C., so called because of its pivotal importance to human history, was the beginning of what we know today as religion: "People became conscious of their nature, their situation and their limitations with unprecedented clarity," Armstrong writes, and new systems of thought, ethical and rational as much as spiritual – Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Greek rationalism – arose to address these new anxieties.

Armstrong's exposition is streamlined and uncluttered without being simplistic. She falters once, when she speculates that today it is novelists who can partly fill the void left by myth. Reading a novel "can be seen as a form of meditation," she writes. "A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives." Given her own evocative insistence elsewhere on the essential ritualistic, sacred nature of myth, this doesn't quite ring true, and one has to wonder if her conclusion was influenced by the fact that her book was specifically commissioned to introduce a series of short novels.

Thus with much anticipation does one turn to the actual novels, the myths, these "universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives" as the series' preface states. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is inspired by the story of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, and particularly by the grisly denouement of Book 22 of the Odyssey: Odysseus, returned to his kingdom in Ithaca, has slaughtered the parasitic suitors who trashed his home and courted his wife in his absence. Next, he commands his son to slay those of the palace handmaids who had been faithless to him by sleeping with the suitors. The young heir obeys his father, but decides an "unclean" death is warranted and instead of killing them with his sword, he hangs them.

Atwood has done her research: she knows that penelopeia means "duck" in Greek; that ribald stories about a Penelope – whether "our Penelope" or someone else – were circulated; and that virginity could be renewed by the blood of male sacrifice. Here, amid the moon cults and palace of women and the returned king, "spattered over with gore and battle filth," as Homer tells us, is fabulous Atwood territory. Unfortunately, she does not grasp this thorny nettle, but chooses instead to blow feather-light dandelions. There are a number of witty devices, like a recurring chorus of maids whose saucy songs fix attention on themselves as opposed to the royal subjects. Atwood tells the story in determinedly irreverent modern argot, apparently to dislodge her tale from its epic moorings. Sometimes it works, in the blunt chapter heading "Helen Ruins My Life," for example. But when it comes to creating characters, the ploy does not pay off. Atwood's Penelope, in her studiedly offhand narration of her own story, is wholly unconvincing, both as a 15-year-old Spartan princess bride and as the older and wiser survivor who has lived to outmaneuver the suitors. Each Odyssean landmark is inverted with a broad wink. In this telling Penelope is a dutiful but hardly love-struck wife; the treacherous maids were in fact her loyal allies; the faithful nurse, Eurykleia, was a controlling old bag; Odysseus never fooled Penelope in his disguise – she just played along. Much of the story's rich material has been dumped at the back of the book in a single chapter, "The Chorus Line: An Anthropology Lecture" ("Yes? You, Sir, in the back? Correct!"). This marvelous material seems not to have been metabolized by Atwood's imagination, and the result is merely a riff on a better story that comes dangerously close to being a spoof. Most fatally, the maids, whose tragic end in the Odyssey is what in part inspired Atwood to choose this story, also remain mere outlines of characters.

The self-conscious jokiness of Atwood's Penelopiad, the voice of the embarrassed modern in the presence of something acknowledged as profound, also informs Jeanette Winterson's Weight, a retelling of the story of Heracles and Atlas. The difference is that this tone exactly suits the boorish Heracles, who is a slayer of men and a ravager of women, dripping blood and sweat and semen, a force of unassailable muscle that has always grabbed what it wanted. It is a portrait that would have been recognized and relished by the ancients. Winterson's empathy is for Atlas, the Titan condemned to uphold the heavens on his shoulders. In the eternity of his suffering, he was relieved only once, by Heracles, who briefly took over the task in exchange for Atlas's agreement to bring him the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.

Winterson's embrace of the mythic landscape is evident in her rich imagery: Atlas, freed from his burden, "kicking the stars like stones"; or cautiously pushing back the peeling wooden gate of his overgrown garden. Her most dazzling flight of imagination, however, is the introduction of poor Laika, the dog sent into space by the Russians in 1957. In Winterson's telling, this absurdly unlikely image is so right, so cathartic, that one can well imagine the old myth having waited for this element to complete it. Weight is marred somewhat by brief autobiographical pieces at the beginning and the end that are not integrated into the story. Still, this short novel fulfills a number of the criteria myth is meant to embody.

Canongate's series is an ambitious, risky project, potentially profound and potentially trivial. As its first productions reveal, an essential element is a genuine chemistry between the author and the chosen subject. As editors line up more writers for this series, they should ask a key question: "Do you, really, really want to tell this particular story?"

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