Natalie Haynes began Pandora’s Jar (2020), her excellent nonfiction collection of essays about women in Greek myth, with the image of herself as a child, sitting on the sofa with her brother watching Clash of the Titans. Although that film inspired Haynes to study Classics, she never thought to question the presentation of Medusa. “She wasn’t a character,” she wrote, “she was just a monster… It would be years before I came across any other version of Medusa’s story, anything that told me how she became a monster, or why.”
This childhood memory appears to have inspired Haynes’s fourth novel, Stone Blind, which reframes the familiar myth of Perseus and Medusa as the story of an innocent girl corrupted and destroyed by an unforgiving world. We first meet Medusa as a baby abandoned on the Gorgon Shore of Libya: a rocky, unpeopled place. She is cared for by her sisters, Sthenno and Euryale. At first, it is unclear if Medusa is truly related to these terrifying creatures “with their tusks and their snaking manes of hair”. Medusa has wings, it’s true, and serpentine hair, but otherwise she looks human. What’s more, the child is mortal, unlike her sisters. We begin to perceive her as the sisters perceive her: they “hoped once again that they had kept her from feeling what they knew to be true: that she was a freak whose birth had horrified both parents”. Here we find the book in a nutshell – ideas of what is monstrous are culturally conditioned, predicated on fear of the unknown. As the sisters learn to love Medusa, they no longer find her monstrous. Unfortunately, Poseidon also catches sight of her, and, just after her 16th birthday, he engineers a meeting whose conclusion is as horrifying as it is inevitable.
The book’s chapters thread between the worlds of gods, monsters and men. The power of the novel lies in the way that, like Ovid, it weaves disparate tales together to create a coherent patchwork. We have the twin stories of Medusa and Perseus, but we also have Hera and Hephaestus; the war of the gods and the giants; Poseidon and Amphitrite; immersions into the worlds of nereids and monsters. Early on, we are told the story of the conception of Athena. Here, as elsewhere, Haynes is brilliant on the brutality of male violence, unshackling it from the euphemism that has couched countless rapes and sexual assaults in woolly abstraction. Metis, the sea nymph who was Zeus’s first wife, is terrified when her former husband comes back to rape her; the second time she silently submits: “She knew what was coming and she knew she could not evade him. The only thing left to her was to hope that her daughter… would survive.”
As with Madeline Miller or Mary Renault, the great pleasure in reading Haynes’s novels is the sense of participating in a continuum of storytelling. In previous novels, she took on the myths of Oedipus and Antigone (in 2017’s The Children of Jocasta) and the Trojan war (in the Women’s prize-shortlisted A Thousand Ships from 2019). In each she has reshaped familiar stories and placed women at their heart. Crucially, as she sets out in Pandora’s Jar, this is not an innovation but an act of restitution: women were prominent in the original tales but have been relegated to the sidelines by centuries of patriarchal retelling.
Haynes began her career as a broadcaster and comedian – her Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics series on the BBC, now in its eighth series, is a total delight. This background is evident in the rollicking narrative voice that energises Stone Blind. It is a voice that feels at once bitingly (post)modern and filled with old wisdom. Increasingly, the narrator interjects and comments on the action as the clash between Perseus and Medusa nears. “The idea that Perseus is a hero is one I have taken exception to since – I can’t even tell you how long it is. As long as I’ve known his name.” By the end of the novel, you’ll agree – and the Gorgon’s head will take on a new and powerful resonance as a symbol of the way stories can be warped by time. Stone Blind acts as a brilliant and compellingly readable corrective.
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes is published by Pan Macmillan (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
