The final chapter outlines the triumph of monotheism and rationality in the West.
Racing through the past five centuries, it argues that the engagement with the imaginative as a path towards transcendence is a function now taken on by art.
Armstrong cites George Steiner, asserting that art, like myth and "certain kinds of religious and metaphysical experience", is a "transcendent encounter that tells us, in effect: 'change your life'". This brings A Short History of Myth neatly back to the series of literary retellings which it is designed to introduce, but much has been leapt over on the way, including the subjects of the first two volumes. The decision to concentrate on world religions in what Karen Armstrong, following the philosopher Karl Jaspers, calls the Axial Age and Post-Axial Period, because of their pivotal positions in the development of human culture, means that there is no space to discuss Greek myth -which would have allowed her to substantiate her earlier claims about the interlocking of myth and ritual. Nor is any attention paid to Iron Age myth systems: those of the Celts and the Scandinavians are the closest to home. Later books in the series are likely to make good this omission: A. S. Byatt, for example, has already adumbrated her imaginative engagement with Norse myth and Breton legend in Possession.
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is formally daring. Penelope's narration of her life, and of her continuing existence among the fields of asphodel in the world of the dead, is punctuated by the utterances of a chorus: the twelve maids who, as a punishment for their sexual liaisons with the slain suitors, are hanged by Odysseus and Telemachus on their return to Ithaca. Atwood deftly exploits the traditional function of the Greek Chorus: warning, commenting on the action, or, as predominantly here, lamenting their powerlessness. The maids are slaves, doubly marginalized by sex and social status, but their choruses, ranging in form from skipping-rhyme to sea-shanty, from court-hearing to anthropology lecture, not always poetic but always accusatory, make real the un- acknowledged suffering of the disempowered, the low-key background to epic.
Ballad, pop song, poetic drama and idyll break up the narrative, reminding us that Atwood is a poet as well as a novelist. The Fates are "the Three Sisters, spinning their blood-red mazes";
Odysseus' wanderings are summarized in a blithely rollicking shanty celebrating "that crafty old codger".
Penelope herself is an Atwood heroine, contrasting with another typical Atwood figure in the form of Penelope's cousin, Helen. Like Elaine in Cat's Eye or Tony in The Robber Bride, Penelope is not especially pretty, but she is clever, patient, understanding towards her difficult teenager, Telemachus, and her wayward husband, but powerless to save the maids whom she comes to love, "My helpers during the long nights of the shroud. My snow-white geese. My thrushes, my doves". Helen recalls Zenia from The Robber Bride; sexual, beautiful, manipulative and conscienceless. Even after death, Penelope meets Helen strolling through the asphodel-fields with scores of fluttering ineffectual male spirits clustering round her. Helen is unchanging, still making catty remarks to her cousin; nor has Penelope lost her acerbity.
Penelope is essentially an observer and a listener; she hears, but does not judge, all the stories told to her: the wild rumours of Odysseus' adventures as he makes his way home, and the toned-down version he delivers as they lie in bed together after his return.
