” I see you. I see all who men call monsters.”
This is the newest novel by Natalie Haynes, whose other recent books A Thousand Ships and Pandora’s Jar I also read this year. This is a novel and is structured more or less like A Thousand Ships, which takes on the broadest view of a given myth (in that book The Iliad) and tells it from multiple perspectives, not necessarily tackling the narrative in strict order. You can guess from the title and the cover that she is dealing with the Medusa myth here. In her book Pandora’s Jar, she talks about how the image of Medusa’s head emblazoning shields across Greece implied a story that never really gets told. We are all familiar with the story of Perseus, but that book suggests that the story of Perseus actually post-dates the images themselves, suggesting a kind of retconning.
I am reminded in this book of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where in one adventure Gilgamesh and Enkidu attack and kill a forest-dwelling being. When asked why they did it, the answer is more or less, because he’s there. As he’s dying, the being, who has literally done nothing wrong curses them, and eventually (spoiler alert on a 7000 year old text) Enkidu dies, presumably from the curse.
Here we have a similar set of stories. Medusa, minding her own business, is raped by Poseiden. He’s mad that people aren’t like excited for him. She’s also cursed to not only have snakes for hair, but also to turn anything she gazes at into stone, whether she wants to or not. Worst of all, if you ask her sisters, is that for all her troubles, she’s not even immortal like they are.
Enter Perseus, who wants to stop his mother from marrying, goes off on a quest to kill a Gorgon. He doesn’t know what a Gorgon is, but that’s not stopping. Aided by the petulant bickering duo of Athena and Hermes, he’s equipped to do the job and he does! We don’t have to think he’s great for it.
In the writing of Natalie Haynes, gods are petulant brats, heroes are monsters, and monsters just want to be left alone.