Natalie Haynes - Stone Blind

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

An excellent, readable and thoughtful retelling 

 

I thought Stone Blind was excellent. I am not a classicist, but I have read quite lot about Greek myths and this seemed to me a fine, readable and thoughtful retelling of the Medusa myth.

We all know the story, I suspect. Medusa was, of course a monster. She was a Gorgon with snakes for hair whose glance turned any living creature to stone, whom the hero Perseus decapitated with divine aid from Athene and whose head he then used as a terrible weapon to save Andromeda etc. Natalie Haynes is interested in far more than that, and especially in Medusa’s origins and the question “Who decides what is a monster?”

Medusa was originally very beautiful, so much so that Poseidon desired her and, in the way of male gods, overpowered and raped her in a temple to Athene. This made Athene angry, so whom did she punish? The victim, because the perpetrator was too powerful to touch, and Haynes paints Medusa as an ordinary, loving woman who has been made into a monster by people and forces over whom she has no control. It’s a point with strong contemporary resonance which Haynes makes dextrously and wittily, while never diminishing its power. She also considers Perseus’s actions and finds him, rather than heroic, to be vain, reckless, incompetent and “a murderous little thug” who “thinks anyone who is not like him is a monster”. Again, it’s thought provoking and has real contemporary relevance.

This is anything but a stodgily politically correct polemic, though. Haynes writes with wit and zing, using various narrative voices, the most powerful of which is Gorgoneion, Medusa’s severed head which became a symbol of protection in ancient Greece. Haynes brings these ancient, mythical characters to life wonderfully; she spares no-one, male or female, their faults, but has a sympathetic understanding of many of them – especially the Gorgon sisters, whose characters are very far from monstrous.

Although it is very different in tone, for me Stone Blind is up there with Pat Barker’s The Silence Of The Girls as a modern re-telling of the tales of ancient Greece – which is very high praise indeed. I thought it was an excellent read which has left me with much to think about, and I can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.)