Once upon a time, someone remarked of three old women that they had a single eye and a single tooth between them. The jibe became a stock joke and then a legend, and the Graeae took their place in the pantheon of Greek mythology. And now along comes Natalie Haynes to write a knockabout Beckettian riff on the theme. In her darkly comic retelling of the entwined stories of Medusa, Perseus and Andromeda, Perseus steals the shared tooth and eye and throws them into the sea. Haynes’s narrator steps forward to jeer at any reader on his side. “I suppose you thought it was clever. Clever Perseus using his wits to defeat the disgusting old women?” In this version of the ancient stories, the hero is as thick as two planks, the maiden tied to a rock is vain and self-centred, and the monster is piteously misunderstood.
Medusa, the Gorgon, is the misogynist’s nightmare. To look at her is to be turned to stone. Freud thought her face, framed by the live snakes she has in place of hair, stood for the mother’s genitals, a glimpse of which would be enough to petrify a boy. Female thinkers, led by Hélène Cixous, have reclaimed and celebrated her. More recently she has been identified as an early target of victim-blaming: it was after Poseidon seduced or raped her in Athena’s temple that the offended goddess transformed her into a monster.
In Haynes’s telling the Olympian gods are spiteful, silly and self-centred. Haynes is not the first interpreter to see them that way, but she may be the wittiest. Aphrodite’s vanity, Zeus’s promiscuity, Poseidon’s self-importance – all are sharply mocked. Haynes’s tone is flippant, her vocabulary modern and colloquial. The narrator is tart, and so sometimes are the deities. Hephaestus prepares to smite Zeus over the head with an axe in order to assist Athene’s parthenogenic birth. “I’m not completely certain,” says Hera drily, that “it will make your head hurt less.” These gods really are wanton boys (and girls) and, yes, they do kill mortals for sport.
Monsters, on the other hand, can be sweet. Medusa is the youngest of three Gorgon sisters. When she is washed up as a baby on the beach where her elder siblings live, they receive her tenderly. She is mortal, and shaped as humans are apart from her wings (the snaky hair comes later), but the elder Gorgons have scales and multiple tusks and limbs powerful enough to smash rocks. Fearsome as they look, though, they are gentle. One of them, prodding the tiny girl on her crib of seaweed, keeps “her talon curled carefully into her palm” so as not to hurt the foundling, and soon – though they find her smallness “horrifying” and her fragility “unpleasant” – they are milking sheep to feed her and watching in amazement as she keeps growing and changing (immortals, of course, are eternally the same).
The third strand of the story is that of Medusa’s killer, the demi-god Perseus. Haynes has fun describing his conception. (Just how, exactly, does a mortal woman like Danaë have sexual congress with a shower of gold?) She writes warmly about Danaë’s saviour, the exiled prince-turned-fisher Dictys – mortals can be generous and forbearing. Perseus, though, is “a vicious little thug”, and, Haynes tells us, “the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding.” To understanding the myth, that is, in the feminist-revisionist form in which she is presenting it here.
Instructed to bring home a Gorgon’s head, Perseus sets out on his quest without pausing to ask who, what or where a Gorgon might be. He is assisted by Athene and Hermes, and a lot of the jokes come from their exasperation with his irredeemable doltishness.
Haynes speaks in many voices. Brief sections admit us to each of the principal characters’ points of view; others are narrated by a crow, an olive grove and the snakes on Medusa’s head. Her narrative encompasses a war between the gods and giants, earthquakes and floods and the passage of aeons of time. Her focus, though, remains sharp and her message clear.
“Who decides what is a monster?” asks Euryale, one of the elder Gorgons.
“I don’t know,” says Medusa. “Men, I suppose.”
Haynes left standup comedy when she realised she preferred tragedy. The dichotomy is a false one. Comedy can break your heart, while tragedy is intensified by a wise-cracking grave-digger. When Haynes turned to prose fiction in A Thousand Ships and The Children of Jocasta she began by playing it disappointingly straight-faced. But with this, her third novel based on ancient myth, she has found a way of using all her classical erudition and her vivid sense of the ambiguous potency of the ancient stories, while being simultaneously very, very funny.
• Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes is published by Mantle (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
