Odysseus is indulged by women: by his mother, his nurse, Eurycleia, and by Penelope, who of course recognizes him the moment the short- legged figure slinks into the palace in his beggar's disguise. Nor can he be changed; once home, he wanders away again in search of that place where his oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan. Even in death he is restless, choosing to be reborn, time after time, for the sheer adventure of it. Central and inescapable here is the horror of the maids' hangings; in contrast to the hanged women of The Handmaid's Tale, they return in a high-kicking chorus line, defiant, angry and irrepressible. Penelope's view of them is guilt-ridden: though she loved them for their gaiety, she could not save them from Odysseus' murderous wrath. Yet she knows that she might have foreseen when she asked them to cultivate, and spy on, the suitors, that the women would be raped and seduced, and that, defined by their disgraced sexual status, they would fall victim to the men's cleansing of their home. Penelope recognizes that she failed her surrogate daughters.
Atwood explores numerous traditions about Penelope, mostly derived from Robert Graves, who is cited as a main source. Thus her mother is a Naiad, given to weeping and excessive bathing because of her watery nature; and after her father tried to drown her as a child, Penelope was saved by ducks, explaining the etymology of her name. Uncritical acceptance of Graves's theorizing lies behind the least successful of the maids' interventions, a parodic conference presentation in which their murder is assimilated to a hypothetical lunar matriarchal cult. Guaranteed to antagonize academic reviewers, it recalls the blinkered academics in the coda to The Handmaid's Tale. Despite the jokiness,, anachronism and rumbustiousness, Margaret Atwood's Penelope is coherently and persuasively imagined; a heroine transplanted from contemporary Toronto to the Elysian Fields.
Weight by Jeanette Winterson retells the myths of Atlas and Heracles. It focuses on their encounter during the Labours of Heracles; Atlas temporarily relinquishes his burden of the Universe to Heracles and goes to fetch the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. The histories of both figures are related: the Titans' futile rebellion, the loss of Atlantis and Atlas' eternal punishment;
Heracles' lifelong feud with Hera, his unconstrained hypermasculinity, his further adventures and death all come within the scope of the book. Just as Penelope is an archetypal Atwood character, so Atlas is a typical Winterson first-person narrator, one of the many versions of herself who inhabit her books. Thoughtful, troubled, kicking against his fate, but also long-suffering, Atlas has to come to terms with the boundaries of human existence and the nature of desire. There is some finely lyrical writing here; the Golden Apples do not glitter, but are rather "tiny, pineapple-scented jewels that hung from fruiting branches covered in dark green leaves", while, vividly but horribly, as Heracles tries to strip off the shirt of Nessus, "it clung closer to him, and it was skin he pulled away, in roasting seared slices". Heracles, a roistering, caricatured ultra-male, lacks subtlety; he is simple-minded and brutish, but not beyond redemption. Moved by human sympathy to help Prometheus, he becomes, if only temporarily, a "good man", and resolves, too late, to settle down and be happy with Deianeira.
Throughout her writing career Winterson has returned again and again to traditional stories, and to her own autobiography; so here, too, she makes multiple "Cover Versions" of Atlas'
destiny, trying to find a future beyond boundaries and desire. Central to the first retelling is the encounter between Atlas and Hera after he has plucked the apples; the tiny jewel-like fruits contain the world and symbolize aspects of time; the apples are packed with meaning, "heavy as thought". Hera reveals to Atlas that knowledge of past and future are contained in them, posing a Boethian riddle of free will and destiny. If Atlas can solve this, he can remake his future. In parallel, Winterson recalls the bedroom lamp she had as a child, an illuminated globe, from which she learned that she could walk away from her present, but which could not reveal how to free herself from the burden she carried with her.
His past, the loss of Atlantis, and the rebellion against the gods cannot be undone but, in a final rewriting, Atlas at last finds contentment and freedom.
Though some will find her ending sentimental, Winterson recuperates one part of our recent past: as one of the generation of early 1960s children weaned on the story of Laika the heroic cosmonaut dog and early victim of the space race, I warmed to Winterson's conclusion. Among the stars, Atlas and Laika attain happiness together beyond the boundaries of space and the torment of desire.
Weight is one of Winterson's more accessible works; her habitual whimsy, insistence on the value of story- telling, her identification with the rebellious, thinking, feeling hero, and the confrontations with the Mother (and, once again, with Mrs Winterson), all recur in an arresting configuration.
