O Homer, Where Art Thou?: Review of “Son of Nobody” by Yann Martel

“The man who edited the Odyssey papyri went blind,” a a Greek professor of mine once remarked, a reminder that there is always a price to pay for discovery. It could be your eyesight. It could be your marriage. You will likely not know the price in advance—only that academia, and the unrelenting pursuit of glory generally, will collect it eventually.

And yet, the thrill of discovery is intoxicating for those blessed enough to experience it—like two University of Colorado classicists who recently uncovered fragments from two lost Euripides plays. A discovery of a lifetime! What’s more, the fragments revealed new twists on ancient myths. . It seems that the ancient world still has mysteries to yield to us—but, again, at what cost?

That is, at least in part, the subject of Yann Martel’s new novel, Son of Nobody. Martel won the Booker Prize for his previous novel, Life of Pi , a quirky and highly philosophical modern tale of religion and survival at sea. His new endeavor, though, is thoroughly Homeric. We meet a Canadian graduate student in classics, Harlow Donne, who leaves his wife and daughter for a year-long fellowship to study the Oxyrhynchus Papyri at Oxford.

Harlow believes that he has discovered a previously lost epic poem of the Trojan War in the papyri, an exciting tale about one called Psoas, “son of nobody.” He proudly pieces it together from tiny scraps, dedicating it to his own daughter, Helen, whom he left behind in Canada. In a breathlessly grandiose tone, he explains:

“From hints and scraps, mere hoary whispers from millennia ago, I have managed to construct thirty coherent fragments of The Psoad , which I present here in English, with explanatory annotations throughout… The reconstruction of this Greek epic was a personal affair, which I share in this thesis not because I want to draw attention to myself, but to show that the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.”

The parallels are many indeed. At the most obvious level, just as Psoas left his wife and children to sail across the Aegean to Troy, so did Harlow leave his family to fly across the Atlantic to England, all to discover the tale of Psoas and win his share of academic glory. Perhaps war and academia are not so far apart after all in their idolization of success and demands for personal sacrifice.

The vast majority of the novel, then, takes the shape of Harlow’s proposed translation of his reconstructed fragmentary epic on the upper half of each page, while the lower part contains the footnotes, the apparatus criticus of sorts, meant to explain the translation and reconstruction decisions made by Harlow. But scholars are people too, and so Harlow’s footnotes move schizophrenically from the academic to the personal and back again, sometimes in the span of a single sentence.

The hero, Psoas of Midea, is the son of nobody, having no famous father of whom to boast. He is a decidedly unheroic common soldier at Troy, undocumented in any other previously known text. And yet, in Harlow’s imagination, he is unforgettable: “Muse, have you forgotten him? Psoas was his name.” Then the haunting repetition a few lines later: “Psoas, I say, was his name and he was my friend.”

And so, on the upper part of each page, we continue to hear the story of Psoas from the perilous landing of the Greek fleet at Troy to the devastating sack of the city by the Greeks ten years later. But, instead of the familiar heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, we hear of the suffering of the common soldiers, dying in droves, struggling to find food, and contending with such quotidian afflictions as lice and fleas. Yet there is much subtle humor too: Martel playfully adds exotic animals like giraffes and elephants into his pseudo-pseudo-Homeric epic, with Harlow’s footnotes suggesting possible interactions of the world of Homer with Bronze Age North Africa.

While in one sense Psoas is a common soldier, he is also much more. In his tale, we see him ultimately confront a Trojan hero and kill him in a duel. Yet, after his duel, instead of celebrating, it is Psoas’s lot “to return to his tent, a broken man,/ the most broken man I have ever seen.” So was it worth it, this relentless pursuit of greatness? This same question haunts Harlow himself. Excited about his discovery, he feverishly works on reconstructing the Psoad , even as his Oxford advisor considers it an unauthorized use of his time, distracting him from the research he was actually brought to do as part of his fellowship.

This, we can see from the beginning, will not end well, and yet somehow it ends even worse than would have been expected. Homeric heroes who went to Troy lost everything, even their lives. Harlow, though still alive by the end of the novel, endures tragic losses, personal and professional. He is, like Psoas, “a broken man.” His love of Homeric epics, his quest for great discovery, led only to suffering. Academia is a cruel mistress, blessing some while crushing others. His wife and daughter mattered very much to Harlow, yet he felt his life was not worth living without the achievement of academic glory.

As a former academic, Harlow’s story was familiar. As I began my dissertation, I too received a fellowship to study at Oxford, one that I turned down—instead, I had a baby. More recently, I left a tenured full professorship to homeschool my kids. Why? Because I’ve seen others take the same path as Harlow and the too-often tragic consequences that follow. Indeed, while the Psoad is a delight to read (and Martel did thorough research on all things Homer!), it lacks verisimilitude as an ancient epic. But the modern side of this novel—the tale of a family broken by the decision of the aspiring academic parent—is extremely realistic.

In pursuit of the modern equivalent of martial glory in academia, Martel suggests, perhaps many academics are not so far removed from Homeric heroes after all. But to sacrifice the people in our lives to our own vainglory is the height of folly—a tragedy too many discover all too late. Thankfully, we have a Savior to rescue us from the need for eternal martial (or academic) glory; one whose embrace is always waiting, regardless of our stature in the eyes of the world.