2.5/5 This is a very odd take on The Oresteian. As the author notes at the end, he chose to take Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ story and embellish with his own imagination. In some parts this works well, giving us characters that do not exist in the original tales and a richer story to work with. But when this story doesn’t work, it’s maddening.

Clytemnestra’s first person passages are a visceral revenge driven account that redeems her actions on Agamemnon in the eyes of the reader. When she’s on stage I’m rapt.

However, I do not understand the writer’s decision to take Orestes’ story to third person limited POV. It creates such a distance from the character to the reader, I was unable to develop any kinship to him. The effect is relegating Orestes as a third-tier character in a story named for him, while giving Clytemnestra and Electra the mic. His part of the story drags, with a narrator just telling you how some guy went from point A to point B. The Orestes portion is an ideal example of where showing and not telling can make or break a narrative.

Electra comes across as an insufferable brat who can’t make up her mind, while also not conveying why Orestes would listen to her in the first place. We see nothing that leads to her earning his devotion. Her loyalties shift on the breeze, for no reason whatsoever. His loyalty was only based on him being forced by the pen to do this woman’s bidding.

The end is so abrupt I had to check to make sure my copy fully downloaded. There is simply nothing there, as if the narrator covered books I & II of the trilogy and thought it fine to deny us any of book III to make this story have meaning. This is all revenge, but no justice or redemption - the very reason why we want a story about Orestes.

To be clear, this book is beautifully written. The writer is so talented with language that even when the spine of the story is a disaster, I’m still devouring the way these sentences come together. But I can’t help but be disappointed that it feels unfinished, as if the narrator became bored with the story and closed the book.

I really enjoyed listening to this as an audiobook. Having some existing knowledge made it easy to become emerged in the story but ultimately it wasn't about the history at all, but driven by the characters and their relationships. Would definitely read more by this author.

Toibin has to be one of the finest writers of this generation. It is a joy to read his prose, always elegant, he can capture the smallest details almost casually, and they break your heart or turn it cold with fear. This retelling of the tragedies befalling the house of Agamemnon is very, very good. The last part of the book, when he departs from the usual story of Orestes is touching and sad in a way the other bloodier stages of the tragedy can't equal. Orestes seems to be an eternal callow youth, with his conscience not fully developed. He follows those he admires, thinking that will be the way that is right. Not compelled by Gods, he blunders into his own nightmares.

Having reinterpreted Christian scripture in his iconoclastic 2013 novel “The Testament of Mary,” celebrated Irish novelist Colm Tóibín now offers a brilliant and challenging reinvention of the Greek myths of the bloody House of Atreus, or as Tóibín terms it, the House of Names.

To appease the gods and raise a wind to blow his foundering fleet to Troy, Greek general Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, dooming himself thereby to be murdered upon his triumphal homecoming by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus.

These are destined in turn to fall by the hand of her son Orestes, urged on by his sister Electra, concluding a cycle of grisly retribution reaching back through generations of rape, murder and even cannibalism in this most dysfunctional of families.

Ancient Greeks wouldn’t have viewed the preceding as “spoilers,” being as familiar with that outline as we are with the story of Jesus, Hamlet or Batman. They would however have expected a poet to give an original spin to those materials, as witnessed by profound differences between Aeschylus’s “Oresteia,” Sophocles’ “Electra” and Euripides’ “Electra and Iphigenia at Aulis,” staged over a 50-year span in fifth-century Athens.

Each generation created its own version of the story, and Tóibín fulfills this ancient expectation by both drawing on and departing from these varied classical sources, inventing fresh episodes that invite new questions.

The novel begins traditionally enough with the ravishing, incantatory testimony of Clytemnestra. Living “alone in the shivering solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed,” Clytemnestra commands the first 70 pages with her hypnotic words, drawing us on with dreadful inevitability from slaughter to slaughter. Tóibín taps into the main vein of Greek tragedy here, providing a stunning and intensely satisfying immersion in bloody vengeance that would do Aeschylus proud.

Later chapters offer a reprise of sorts in the voice of Electra, whose heart belongs to daddy but who in matters of revenge is very much her mother’s daughter. Stewing away at her “outpost of the underworld” amid the reconciled shades of her sister and father, Electra wonders longingly about her missing brother, whom she has cast in the role of avenging angel. As years pass, where is Orestes, and will he ever return?

Tóibín engages these questions with an extracanonical third-person relation of the adventures and exploits of Orestes in exile. Spirited away by the crafty Aegisthus on the eve of Agamemnon’s murder, Orestes and his fellow fugitives Leander and Mitros escape captivity to wander through a wilderness desolated by years of war, a place of aging widows and fallow fields roamed by packs of dogs. Here they learn how to love, how to kill and how to tame the encircling darkness with stories.

In striking contrast to the upright flames of his mother and sister, Orestes wavers amid perplexities and doubts, bringing a curious and unsettling energy to the story that persists after the preordained crisis and catharsis resolves to a half-lit world of restless ghosts, palace intrigue and administrative routine.

Might this haunting uncertainty be a new kind of curse, visited on those who come of age after the death of the gods? We are left to draw our own conclusions. Euripides would approve.

Solid retelling of the fall of the hose Agamemnon. Read it to see if it would be a good companion piece when one of my classes reads Electra in an ancient literature course I'm teaching.

Poetic reimaging of events of Iphigenia at Aulis (through "flashbacks") and the first two plays of the Oresteia.

Clytemnestra's motivations were compellingly presented. Though Tóibín strays quite a bit from the myths/classics, he presents one of the most compelling cases for Electra's and Orestes's actions.

But this story is so different that I really wanted the novel to be far longer, to find out what happens to these versions of Electra and Orestes.