Son of Nobody

In the inspired latest from Booker winner Martel (Life of Pi), a literature scholar discovers an alternate account of the Trojan War. Harlow Donne, a Canadian PhD student, has left behind his failing marriage and his young daughter, Helen, for a year’s scholarship at Oxford. There, his dissertation on Homer’s Iliad is sidelined by his discovery of a long-lost work titled The Psoad, whose hero is not highborn like Homer’s Achilles but a Greek commoner: Psoas of Midea, son of nobody. In passages of The Psoad translated by Donne, the reader learns of Psoas’s feats and trials, including his battle with Prince Mestor of Troy, to whom Psoas declares, “I am no less of a man than you are.” Like The Iliad, The Psoad is in dactylic hexameter, but Donne opts to render it in a more accessible style, which he describes as “an unfettered, bare-boned attempt at Greek folk dance.” In Donne’s own story, which unfurls in footnotes to the translation, the scholar muses on the line between fact and fiction, human nature and sorrow, and the power of Homer’s Iliad compared to the Gospels. Some may find Martel’s grand motifs a bit overdrawn, but his hero’s devotion for ancient poetry is contagious (“The authority of the Gospels relies on its claim to truth, while that of The Iliad relies on its power to captivate”). It’s an appealing labor of love. (Mar.)