Mythology

As a prolific writer of literary fiction, Rupert Thomson has had plenty of practice in creating a good story. In Dark is the Morning, he seems drawn to the question of whether a satisfactory narrative structure can be imposed on life. The tug between the meaningless, chaotic nature of reality and the more conventional art of storytelling is at the centre of the novel, which concerns the ill-fated romance between the narrator, Gino, and the enigmatic Franca. Thomson even appears awkward about how neatly fabular this tale turns out to be in his opening chapter: ‘I still find the whole thing hard to believe.’ This self-consciousness is apparent throughout, with Thomson making repeated reference to the power of storytelling in his characters’ lives.

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).

Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected his role in protecting flocks of goats and those who herded them among the wild hills of Arcadia. Panic was his superpower, freaking out mortals in the woods with distorted sounds, even neutralising hostile armies. This might seem like an adequate portfolio of godly aspects, but, as Paul Robichaud demonstrates in Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, it didn’t take long for things to get more complicated.

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our pre-literate past is a history without a clear story: excavated stones and waste pits, fragments of myth and philological association. The early literate past is little clearer. The later Bronze Age of the Myceneans, the Minoans and Moses is a speculative assembly. Later, the surfaces of the Athens of Plato and Pericles are solid in marble and rational in thought, but the myths remain strange and violent memories, subject to an alien, evasive logic we cannot quite follow. ‘These Greeks,’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused as he climbed up to the Acropolis in 1908, ‘where are they?