On Pandora and the opening of Zeus’ gift

But when he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare, the Father sent glorious Argus-Slayer, the swift messenger of the gods, to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never take a gift of Olympian Zeus, but to send it back for fear it might prove to be something harmful to men. But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood. For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. – Hesiod, Works and Days.

I’m writing this on my way back from a conference in Dublin, where I have found it very difficult to give a paper on classical monsters in Hollywood films since 2000, and equally difficult to concentrate on the panel I have been attending about the nature of the ancient epic in the modern world. British classicists have checked the BBC and social media obsessively, sworn a fair bit, looked at each other hopelessly. Our European and international colleagues have commiserated, hugged, looked at an equal loss. And those who are British but work in the EU, or are EU nationals who work in Britain, have been doing a bit of everything.

Pandora’s jar has been opened and we are seeing the evils come out into the world.

We have had the Prime Minister resign, key pledges from the Leave campaign dismissed as ‘mistakes’, the financial markets drop sharply and struggle to right themselves, people who voted Leave astonished and upset to discover their vote actually counted, Scotland and Ireland reconsidering their positions as part of the Union, the EU Commission trying to get this process over and done with as quickly as possible, and on, and on, and on.

I am worried for myself, for my son, for my little family that had just got a little bit of stability, for my wider family, for the higher education sector, for those who had so much to lose – although, if I’m honest, in a rather blank sort of way, because I suspect I’m still in shock.

And yet. And yet.

When Pandora had opened the jar, and all the evils had flown out and into the world, one last thing remained. Hope.

Hope in the majority of people under 49 who voted to Remain, and whose political day is coming. Hope in three months’ grace before a change of Prime Minister. Hope in the pause before Article 50 is invoked. Hope in the time it will take the dust to settle and to see what landscape actually remains. Hope in the potential this has to re-engage people who believed their votes didn’t matter. Hope in the unlikeliest of places, also in the jar. Whether or not it too was an evil remains to be seen.

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds.

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Film review: Hercules (2014)

We’re quite fond of Dwayne Johnson in our house. He’s got good form on historical-ish fantasy films (see The Mummy Returns and The Scorpion King), plus he played a tooth fairy opposite Julie Andrews – what’s not to like? So we were looking forward to the new Hercules – Ian McShane as Amphiaraus, Rufus Sewell as Autolycus and John Hurt as Lord Cotys basically have far too much fun chewing the scenery, which is in and of itself utterly glorious. It’s a film that’s having fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously, which immediately makes it more enjoyable to watch. But I’ve watched plenty of atrocious cinema in the name of classical reception in my time – so why did this not only feel like a more fun viewing experience than Immortals, but also a more successful one from the classical reception perspective?

One thing strongly in its favour is its choice of theme. Some recent films have got, frankly, a bit overawed with the idea of Family as a unifying concept for classical reception films, normally in terms of sorting out questions of Male Identity and Man’s Place In This World, and it gets a bit superficial after a while. (I wrote about this a bit in terms of the Clash of the Titans remake if you’re interested – link to PDF.) Hercules couldn’t care less – we’re not dealing with an identity crisis here, or at least, not one that springs out of a contested identity. What the movie is far more interested in are questions of deception and appearance – how do we know what is true? How do we know what really happened?

This attitude first reveals itself in a wonderful meta-awareness of how ancient myth actually worked, and allows the movie to wear that heritage lightly. Hercules, it turns out, isn’t a one-man show – he comes with a team. One of that team is his nephew Iolaus (Reece Ritchie), whose job is to sing the tales of Hercules and thus put fear into his enemies. Except the tales he sings are, shall we say, massaged. They are explicitly not the truth. In them, Hercules becomes the son of Zeus rather than an orphan; he alone slays fantastic enemies, without the help of his team; his skin becomes invulnerable and his lion skin becomes impenetrable. We see the creation of a myth happen in front of us, but as a deliberate choice on the part of the characters who are mainly interested in getting the next paid commission – which is easier if you have good PR. Sure, Hercules is strong and performs feats of strength, but isn’t it more sellable if he’s also a son of Zeus? That lightness of touch means the ‘myth is all created, innit’ feels freer than, for instance, Immortals‘ rather clunky True Origins of the Minotaur story.

Julian Anderson’s Thebans at the ENO

Anyone thinking that classical reception has had its day in anything except cheesy cinema should take a look at Julian Anderson’s new opera Thebans, having its premier run at the English National Opera at the moment. Regular readers will know that there is quite a lot of classical reception knocking around in opera, so Anderson is following a well-established inspirational route (as indeed was Harrison Birtwhistle). It was very exciting to be in the audience for one of the earliest performances a couple of weeks ago – but, as you might have gathered, I have some thoughts on how this material was used and put together. I don’t have a great deal to say about the musical side, but here are a couple of reviews which do just that.

Anderson had set himself quite an ambitious task in getting the three Theban plays into one opera, and has fiddled around with the order – he starts with Oedipus Rex, going to Antigone for the second act, and Oedipus Colonus for the finale. Anderson argues in his program notes that his reason for doing this was to create more dramatic unity. Each act begins with a chronological subtitle (‘past’, ‘future’ and ‘present’) so we know where we are in the arc; this adds to a sense of inevitability about the plot’s movement, but does take a bit of the bite out of the bleak dead end which closes Antigone. In order to get everything in, Anderson has also done some rigorous pruning – Oedipus Rex takes up the hour or so of the first act, but Antigone is given twenty minutes, and Oedipus at Colonus has half an hour. Again, this is probably favourable to slavishly following the structure of the originals, especially since they were not originally written as a trilogy. However, those choices to cut have consequences.

At first, I was quite keen on the Antigone being trimmed that much – I think it’s a difficult play to produce well, because the plot’s reliance on an audience understanding the tension between honouring your state and honouring your gods tends to flummox modern directors (see my thoughts on the National’s recent Antigone). However, the problem that Anderson’s trimming of the play creates is that Antigone herself is more or less side-lined – her great agon with Creon is all but gone, and instead the emphasis lies on the relationship between Creon and his son Haemon. Antigone’s probing challenge to the state is replaced by Creon’s suffering at his calamitous parenting; Antigone’s death becomes tragic because of the action it causes for Haemon rather than her sacrifice and commitment to principles. She also becomes almost silent. As you may imagine, I have Issues with adaptations that silence women’s voices, particularly those from the ancient world (even if they are voices enacted by men).

Classical reception at Eurovision 2014

As anyone who follows my Twitter feed will know, I spent Saturday night curled up in front of Eurovision. Because, frankly, we finally have a proper television, and I am fully in favour of anything that lets me watch great big showcase cheesiness. Of course, the problem with watching anything this pop-culture-y is that there is a fair chance that something related to classical reception will turn up on the screen, and my wee analytical brain will jump into action.

This year, the most sustained offering came from Italy:

This is La Mia Città performed by Emma Marrone. If you look at a translation of the lyrics, you will see it is a paean to modern city living, presumably in Rome – commuting, finding a parking space, urban narcissism, getting high heels stuck in manhole covers, the lot. Fine. However, the costume stylists clearly decided that urban commuter was not a look they were going for this season, so they tapped into the ancestral heritage of the country instead. Emma is given a marvellous white tunic with gold spangling that looks, certainly from the waist up, very reminiscent of a Roman military breastplate; a big white cape with a rather nice jewelled neck clasp, just in case we weren’t getting the military allusion, particularly at the start of the sequence; and a golden laurel wreath in her hair, the symbol of the military victor and holder of imperium. In fact, the whole band get to have golden laurels, even the keytar player. (I couldn’t get a good enough look at Emma’s shoes in the footage to establish their design beyond the fact they have very high heels, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some element of sandal straps in there.)

However, as far as classical reception goes, that’s it. From what I could see in the footage of the big stage screens, no ancient imagery turns up, although there were one or two glyphs that you might have argued were vaguely ancient if you felt like pushing it, and a bit of circling Greek keys pattern. The lyrics had no particular classical interest; they don’t even specify that the city under discussion is Rome, clearly aiming to have general appeal for metropolitan voters. The staging was not particularly interesting and didn’t make any use of the classical possibilities – the band stood still whilst Emma strode around (a time-honoured Eurovision pattern). Which raises the question – why bother going classical in the first place?

It’s not as if you can’t use classical reception in a really interesting way in musical performances – Madonna’s Superbowl half-time show in 2012 showed us that it’s possible to take the theme and do conceptually clever and witty things with it. Unfortunately, Italy this year haven’t gone in that direction. Instead, they’ve chosen to essentially run with a stripped-down basic visual semantics that says ‘ancient Roman imperialism’ that we’re all just supposed to get. Apart from a few suggestions that Emma was channelling She-Ra, in the main all the responses on Twitter seem to have happily gone along with it. Nobody’s saying ‘what the hell? Why? What does this mean? What are we meant to make of this visual combination of white and gold? What’s with the head-pieces?’ – because everybody knows how to read this stuff.

Sadly, the Italian team didn’t decide to do anything beyond telling us they know their own heritage, and know we know it. The only possible interpretation I can come up with is that it was a subliminal attempt to influence the voters at home by suggesting that the group had authority over Eurovision and were the only possible victors – not an angle supported either by the song or the staging. A wasted opportunity, methinks.

Richard Strauss’ Elektra at the Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House has just revived its production of Strauss’ Elektra. Oddly enough, I think I saw this production when it was first put on in 2003 as part of my third year undergraduate unit on classical reception, but that was quite a long time ago and I’ve got better at both listening to opera and analysing classical reception since then. The opera is Strauss’ version of the episode in the Oresteia cycle when Orestes returns home to kill his mother, first sending a false report that he has been killed in a chariot race in order to allay her suspicions and let him get close to her in his guise as an eye-witness to the fatal accident. The libretto, written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, started off as a adaptation of Sophocles’ version of this story, but as is the way with myth, became the poet’s own retelling,  which emphasises the emotional currents of the story in a way that complements Strauss’ powerful music. It’s also an extremely compressed opera – it only lasts ninety minutes (no interval), and basically takes you through a rollercoaster of conflicting and extreme emotions. I didn’t notice how drawn in I had become until the curtain fell and I realised how much I’d been holding my breath. Christine Goerke is sensational as Elektra, and there wasn’t a weak performance among the rest of the cast – the deep grumbling bass of Iain Paterson’s Orest, when he finally appears, was particularly effective, Michaela Schuster offered a superb power-mad and unhinged Klytemnestra, and Adrianne Pieczonka created a Chrysothemis who stood in stark contrast to her sister but not in head-on conflict (which, given the score, is much harder than it sounds). All of which stands as a recommendation for an evening of stunning music and performance, although be quick if you’re in London as the last performance is in mid-October.

Putting aside the performance component (although that is very much in this particular production’s favour), what of the classical reception element? What strikes me is that way in which both Strauss and Hofmannsthal picked up on the emotional trauma of the mythic story. The score reflects it, and so does the structure of the piece – Elektra is on stage for most of the ninety minutes, and the music itself is virtuosic. A poster reproduced in the program from the 1910 premier in London promises “the most arduous score ever written” (not to mention the puntastically dreadful assurance that this is “the opera that will ‘Elektrify’ London”), and it’s not far wrong – it’s technically highly demanding. I’ve never seen a production before where water bottles have formed part of the set and swigging from them has been choreographed in – but I can’t see any other way of a singer surviving, frankly. What all this highlights to me is that the emotional punch of this episode is what caught Strauss and Hofmannsthal, and that is what they seek to bring out most from the source material.

Charpentier’s Medea at the ENO

It’s all opera all the time here at the moment! My recent visit to see ENO’s production of Charpentier’s Medea was a Christmas present, because you can never get too much of classical reception. This is another example of receptions overlapping receptions (which I’ve talked about before) – not only does this production offer a chance to unpick Charpentier’s adaptation of the Medea myth (and the approach taken by his librettist, Corneille), but also to think about the ENO’s staging and production choices. Before I get into that, however, I should take a moment to encourage you to get to one of the remaining performances if you possibly can. Yes, it is a long opera – the French habit of inserting ballet at every possible opportunity means that the score might be considered a little on the cumbersome side. But the music is divine. Sarah Connolly gives us an utterly credible, passionate and bristling Medea, and the chemistry between her and Brindley Sherratt’s Creon during the pivotal scene when he orders her out of Corinth crackles with electricity. The other singers are also exceptionally fine (a slight tightness in the top register of Jeffrey Francis’ Jason faded as the evening went on, and in fairness I was at the first performance), and the orchestra do a fabulous job – not least the two theorbo players, an instrument I can’t ever recall seeing in the wild before but which add a very special timbre to the musical atmosphere. Finally, the ballet sequences are handled wonderfully. They demonstrate a light hand, with a touch of archness that hint at the production’s awareness that this is (for a modern audience) rather silly, combined with enough eroticism to echo the reason the ballet sections were originally introduced – to keep the elite young men in the audience visually stimulated.

The Medea sarcophagus, Altes Museum, Berlin. Image taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Now, to the classical reception content. I want to start by thinking about the changes that Corneille made to the original plot – which aren’t as drastic as one might expect. The overall structure of the drama cleaves very closely to that of Euripides, particularly in the final scene where Medea reveals to Jason that his children are dead. However, there are a number of other interesting changes in the basic plot structure. The one that stands out most to me is that Creusa, Creon’s daughter, is quite frequently on stage, and is given her own personality and motivations. This is a major departure from the Euripidean original, where Creusa never appears on stage (and is in fact never named), and her grisly death from poisoned gifts is reported through a particularly graphic messenger speech. This is mainly to do with the convention that Greek tragedy places deaths off-stage, but that in and of itself doesn’t prevent Creusa from appearing – indeed, one imagines the fight that Euripides would have written for the two women and mourns the lost opportunity. Bringing Creusa on-stage allows Corneille and Charpentier to stage this confrontation, as well as more subtle interactions between the two women, but also allows them to create a relationship between Creusa and Jason, adding to the audience’s sense of his spinelessness.

The other major plot change is that the context of the play is altered. In Euripides’ original, Medea and Jason are just hanging around Corinth; in Corneille’s version, Corinth is gearing up for a war with Acastus of Thessaly, hot on Medea’s tail after her outrages there, and the couple need to keep Creon and Creusa on side so that they and their sons will be protected. This shift also allows for the introduction of a rival for Creusa’s hand, the prince Orontes of Argos, who has come to provide military support to Corinth and to marry Creusa, to whom he is formally betrothed. This has a number of interesting knock-on effects, not least of which is the added complication of the Jason/Creusa relationship when she’s meant to be betrothed to someone else and he’s meant to be married to someone else – Creon is quite happy to ignore both of these prior commitments and string the spare partners along, so when he eventually gets driven mad I have to say I didn’t feel terribly sympathetic. The second effect is that Orontes takes on the Aegistus role from Euripides and promises Medea a safe haven when she leaves Corinth – a promise that is rather less effective at the end of this opera, as Orontes has been stabbed by the insane Creon, but there we are. He also serves as a partner to her grief and frustration at Creusa and Jason’s betrayal, providing some balance to the piece. Finally, his inclusion ups the political content and relevance of the opera – it heightens the dimension of realpolitik manouvering, as Creon tries to work out how to keep his ally happy and obtain military victory whilst ensuring the most advantageous marriage for his daughter in the long term. It’s this aspect, I think, that speaks most interestingly to the context of the opera’s composition; it was first performed in 1693, and began with a prologue in praise of Louis XIV (omitted from the ENO’s production). This was a time when the royal houses of Europe were swapping sons and daughters in alliance marriages with considerable care and deliberation; the choice to generate this element of diplomatic juggling, and its dramatic failure, must have had a certain political resonance for the contemporary audience.

And so to the ENO’s adaptation. The most interesting choice, in some ways, that they’ve made is to set the opera in the Second World War, and designate each nation as a different country – so the Corinthians are French, Jason and his troops are British, and Orontes and the men from Argos are fabulously brash American airmen (flying in to save the day!). This works with the underlying civic context of the libretto by really foregrounding that political element of the opera; as a directorial choice, it’s very effective. It also implies some unspoken cultural differences between Jason and Orontes. Jason, for instance, sings to Creusa in moments of private passion, all very Brief Encounter; Orontes, by contrast, declares his love through a spectacular party and floor show, involving a Weimar-esque singing Cupid, a crooning lounge singer, and a set of ballet dancers dressed as sailors, American car mechanics, and 1940s magazine pin-ups with a bit of extra raunch. (There’s a video of the process of building Cupid’s plane here if you want to get a feel for it.) One feels quite sympathetic for Creusa’s preference for something a bit less ostentatious. The choice to make the men from Argos American airmen also plays into a set of British assumptions about what the Americans stationed here were like during the Second World War, and that sets up a particular dynamic of interaction that maps onto the libretto very effectively.

I should mention an interesting point about the ENO’s casting. Creusa, in Euripides’ play, is a young girl; Medea, when Jason meets her, is a young girl, and he is a young man – say, perhaps, 16 and 20? A little difference, but not a great deal. I have always presumed that Medea is in her mid-20s, Jason his early 30s, and Creusa her late teens for the plot of the Medea, particularly given the ancient world’s usual practice of fairly early childbearing. However, the ENO doesn’t follow this. Their Creusa is presumably in her early 20s; their Medea is in her late 30s/early 40s – and Jason. Oh, Jason. Jason is at least early 40s, if not quite a bit older. Put simply, they have deliberately worked the casting so that Jason is old enough to be Creusa’s father, and the comparison with a boyish Orontes serves to foreground the age difference. This makes a number of differences to the production, most obviously the rather unhealthy possessive attitude Creon has to his daughter (of which she, thankfully, seems blissfully unaware), which both provides the route for Medea to drive him mad and a psychological motivation for Creusa to find Jason as attractive as she does. However, it also plays into the well-known trope of older men abandoning their wives for a younger model – with the Chris Huhne/Vicky Pryce affair floating around, again, this aspect of the plot gains a certain resonance and relevance, and the acting out of the consequences become that little bit more poignant.

As for the presentation of Medea’s witchcraft itself, the ENO has made the excellent decision to ditch realism and go for the full-on zombie nurse spirits rising from the underworld approach when Medea invokes hell and poisons the dress she will give Creusa. The whole point of the Medea myth is to highlight the dreadfulness of the unknown and the dark – to do anything less that bring the witchcraft to the stage would have neutered the production. The ENO’ s staging keeps the ghastly and the grotesque (mainly through clever choreography), but also lets the opera properly move into the realm of the mythical. The scene where Medea torments Creon is similarly carefully managed, in that there’s enough overlap of reality with magic to indicate a sense of wavering boundaries which Medea controls; the final scene, which closes with Medea ascending on a plinth as Jason mourns over the dead bodies of his sons, again retains the Euripidean sense of a dark world which the gods have abandoned, tying in well with the underlying WWII themes of the production. Medea’s costume also represents her shift from following human laws to playing by her own rules. When she has decided to call up hell, she removes her heels and neat twin piece, and instead stamps around the stage barefoot in a black shift. Her transition is even more marked as this is the moment she decides to hand over a shimmering silver ballgown to Creusa, its poison only to be activated if Creusa will not give Jason up and marry Orontes – which, of course, she will not. The symbolism of clothing thus becomes a marker of status, of Medea’s move away from the laws of humanity as represented by Creon into the otherworldly power that up to this point she has kept in reserve, and of Creusa’s slow but inexorable journey towards her tortuous death.

Let me repeat myself – go and see it if you possibly can, or if you can’t, watch out for a revival of the production. This one deserves to be taken off the shelf again in the future.

Birtwistle’s Minotaur at Covent Garden

The Royal Opera House; image courtest of Flicr user Cebete under a Creative Commons license.

Apparently I’m in the mood for modern and experimental stuff at the moment, because my most recent cultural outing was to see the current production of Harrison Birtwistle’s Minotaur at Covent Garden. The opera was a commission for the Royal Opera House and was first performed in 2008; I think this is its second set of performances, which isn’t unreasonable for a new composition. There’s one really big obvious classical reception point to make up front – the world of classical myth is still full of power and influence for all sorts of cultural enterprises, opera included. It’s not just those eighteenth century chaps who find it inspirational.

Birtwistle’s opera contains three main protagonists – Ariadne, Theseus and the eponymous Minotaur, pleasingly given his proper name Asterios. There is also a snake priestess and her priest interpreter; a chorus of Innocents, tribute from Athens; a Crowd; and a flock of Keres, spirits of the dead who feast on those murdered by violence. Ariadne is on the Cretan shore when the latest tribute ship from Athens arrives; she tricks Theseus into staying with her as she sends the Innocents into the labyrinth. When they reach the centre, the Minotaur slays them, and then dreams as the Keres tuck into the bodies of his victims. In his dream, he has human speech, and sings of his desire for freedom. Ariadne tries to bargain with Theseus, but he will not agree to take her to Athens with him as his wife. She then goes to the Snake Priestess, who (through her priest) reveals that Theseus can use a ball of twine to get in and out of the maze safely. Ariadne then offers Theseus a deal – her secret of how he can get into the Labyrinth and back for a promise to take her with him. (Of course, “Theseus and Ariadne will set sail for Athens!” doesn’t quite mean what she thinks it means…) In the final scene of the opera, Theseus descends to the Labyrinth and slays the beast, who gains the power of human speech in as he dies to sing his last notes, before a final Ker appears on stage to feast on him.

Of course, the obvious question is to ask what difference it makes for an opera to be written in the eighteenth century and for one to be written in the twenty-first century. The answer, as so often, appears to be Freud. Ariadne, Theseus and Asterios operate as Freud’s tripartite soul, the id, ego and super-ego; Ariadne-as-ego battles Asterios-as-id, while Theseus-as-super-ego is the only one with the power to overcome the beastly urgings of the soul. There’s lots of reflective language and action used to indicate that these figures are all aspects of the same person. For instance, Ariadne walks safely around Asterios after he’s killed the Innocents, and lies down next to him to sleep; Asterios sees both Ariadne and Theseus as his reflection in his dreams; and both Theseus and Asterios are sons of Poseidon. (One might also point to the hierarchy of man -> woman -> beast in the characters here.)  The opera thus becomes a psychological drama, the tale of the self’s battle with its animal instincts and its attempt to get them under control.

Film Review: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)

I meant to watch this before giving my talk at the Birmingham and Midlands Classical Association branch sixth form conference earlier this year, but didn’t get around to it for various time-related reasons. They have, however, invited me back to speak again next year, and I’m intending to go with my other plan, which was to talk about this film in tandem with the new Clash of the Titans and The Immortals – but that, of course, that means watching this one first.

I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I came away pleasantly surprised. The plot, based on the first of the best-selling series by Rick Riordan, has the eponymous hero discover that he is in fact the son of Poseidon, that he is suspected of stealing Zeus’ lightning bolt, that there is a whole parallel world for the children of gods, and that he had better find the lightning bolt or else there will be war between the gods. First, however, he must rescue his mortal mother from his uncle Hades… this leads to a road trip across America to collect pearls from various locations that will serve as the escape route from the underworld before a good old fashioned katabasis under the Hollywood sign. It is presumably not too much of a spoiler to observe that the world must survive in order for there to be sequels.

Book review: Where Three Roads Meet – Salley Vickers

I don’t know how many of you are aware of the Canongate Myths series of books, but if they’re not on your radar, they should be as they are pretty awesome. The editors of the series basically invite significant writers to come and ‘re-do’ a myth of their choice, which is completely in keeping with the dynamic nature of myth itself – the whole point of mythic stories was that they could be tweaked and varied and have new bits added to them and have bits taken away depending on what the story was needed for. (Hence why, for instance, so many different places claim to be the birthplace of assorted Greek heroes.) The most recent myth is A. S. Byatt’s retelling of the Ragnarok story, so myth isn’t being interpreted as being strictly ‘classical’; that said, one of the initial volumes was The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, which took on the Odyssey and turned it on its head to look at things through the eyes of Penelope and, in particular, the maids who Odysseus and Telemachus kill at the end of the poem.

The book I want to discuss in this post is Salley Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet, which takes on the myth of Oedipus in a really interesting way. You can’t think of Oedipus these days without thinking of the Oedipus Complex, and thence to Doctor Freud – so Vickers grasps this inevitable nettle with both hands, and makes this a tale of Freud being told the Oedipus story by a ghostly figure, who ends up being the prophet Tiresias visiting him through a mysterious time/space travel thingummie. How the mechanics work aren’t important. What is important is the dialogue, the conversation between the two men. Vickers starts with a short precis of Freud’s life and the various crisis points that she wishes to emphasise, including various small and interesting details like Freud’s famous spearless Athena (paging Doctor Freud… oh, wait). Having set the stage, as it were, the main body of the novel takes the form of a series of dialogues, with the date of each dialogue noted at its beginning. The first takes place after the first operation Freud had for mouth cancer; the subsequent dialogues are dated when Freud has come to London and is gradually succumbing to ill health and the cancer that would eventually kill him.