In this novel, Toibin tells more of the story of the consequences of the battle for Troy. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra rule the city of Mycenae. They have three children, Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. Agamemnon asks Clytemnestra to come to his battle camp with Iphigenia to see them off but in reality, his plans are to sacrifice Iphigenia to gain favor with the gods.

After this betrayal, Clytemnestra goes back to the castle and takes a lover. Together, they rule the city and send off Orestes along with other noble sons to a camp far away. When Agamemnon returns successful from the Trojan War, the two murder him and leave his body to be seen, demonstrating that they are now the rulers of Mycenae.

Years later, Orestes returns with another boy, Leander. He learns what his mother has done and when she continues her bloody ways, he and his sister decide that she must be defeated.

This is my first novel by Colm Toibin, although I'm reading Let The Great World Spin in the next few months. He is a master storyteller, showing the loves, the deceit and the yearning for power that typified the ancient courts. The gods were never far away and the capriciousness that they showed was mimicked by the rulers. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction and mythology.

This book was so compelling. I enjoyed the way that it shifted narrators for the different parts, though I admit to having a least favorite narrator!

I first learned the rough plot of The Oresteia as a nine year-old. Studying the Greek and Roman myths, the story's lead characters feature in the prologue to The Luck of Troy. Learning of their subsequent fate, I remember thinking it was incredibly depressing. A quarter of a century later, my opinion has not shifted. It really is one of those dreadful 'And then everybody died' stories. Still, I'm a fan of Colm Toibin as a writer and the galley had been sitting in my Kindle for an indecently long time so I put on my Greek Mythology Challenge with the others. While the royal family of Mycenae may seem an unusual choice of subject for a writer better known for his novels about ordinary women, when you look closer, it's actually not so surprising. Clytemnestra may be the wronged queen wreaking her vengeance but in House of Names she is a grieving mother. With not a single deity named in the whole novel, this is a version of the tale that remains stubbornly earthbound.

Opening with the savage scene of Iphigenia's sacrifice, Toibin spares his reader nothing. The rising horror and humiliation as Clytemnestra and her daughter realise that they have not been summoned to the coast for a wedding. The cold panic as it becomes clear that nothing will dissuade Agamemnon from his plan. We do not even get the cold consolation of the exchange of the deer at the last minute. Iphigenia screams as she meets her brutal death. She never stops struggling against it. It does not feel like myth. It feels real. Agamemnon's desire to curry favour with his troops, his refusal to lose face in front of them by backing down. Clytemnestra's raw fury and betrayal - she is captured and buried alive for three days afterwards. Of course she seeks her revenge. How could you ever get out from under such a trauma?

Clytemnestra seeks out her husband's greatest enemy, his cousin Aegisthus. She invites him into her bed, the two of them plotting Agamemnon's destruction. Yet when he returns at last, with an improbably smug Cassandra in tow, murdering him does not bring Clytemnestra the satisfaction that she had expected. Instead there is even more destruction to follow. Flanking her narrative are her two surviving children, the eerie Electra and the bovine Orestes, seeking to avenge their father. The desire to seek justice for such a parent never really made sense to me even as a child. Did they forget what he did to their sister? In honesty, even with Toibin's beautiful writing, it still doesn't really hang together. Yes, Electra felt invisible next to her sister. Many people can relate to feelings of insecurity alongside their siblings. It doesn't mean that you would turn a blind eye when your father slices their neck open because he thinks it will change the way the wind is blowing.

Electra is an engagingly spooky narrator, padding along the hallways of the palace like a ghost. She is not the Joan of Arc figure from the original myth. She is more a cowed and stifled young woman, repressing her true sexuality and trying to stay alive. Her brother Orestes was less interesting and his sections of the novel felt like a bit of a slog. We see him taken prisoner by Aegisthus' followers, kept in a camp with other boys where they are forced to live in silence and they write each other's sins on a slate. Later, he escapes with two fellow-prisoners, coming to a farm run by an old woman, the eponymous House of Names. There they hide for several years before Orestes and his friend Leander finally decide to return home. Yet Orestes is no hero. He is utterly blank. And not at all quick on the uptake. It required a considerable suspension of belief to credit the notion that he never worked out who killed his father and that nobody ever told him. For seven years? Was he stupid? And later in the novel when he believes that he is about to become a father and Ianthe gently tells him that the things that they have done in the dark are not enough to conceive a child. I could pity Orestes but I did not find him interesting.

House of Names is one in a crowd of contemporary novels which grants a voice to the forgotten females of Greek mythology and it was interesting to see that from a male voice. It was clear to the eye though that Toibin was drawing the story back to his usual preoccupations. The prison where Orestes grows up is tonally similar to a Christian Brothers school, with the weekly baths and confession culture. The landscape that the boys also felt familiar to me - it wasn't Greece. It's definitely Ireland. Even the old lady's stories are borrowed from a different mythology. The novel is a retelling of Greek classical mythology without anything that made it Greek in the first place.

When I think of this book, I picture mist and clouds. White corridors in the palace, thick with whispers. The story feels washed-out. The characters never seem to face each other. Each is unrecognisable when seen through the other's eyes. Yet amidst all of the lies, dissembling and the deception, there is also horrible, horrible violence. Bloodshed. Piles of bodies. There is a real whiplash contrast between the dream-like years on the farm and what comes after. Perhaps another reason why Orestes seemed so disorientated. It was like going from The Children of the New Forest straight into Game of Thrones. Yet, Toibin has kept his cast so sparse that it is hard to believe that these people are actually in charge of a whole kingdom. It is hard to visualise real battles.

I wonder perhaps if the story would have come across more effectively onstage. It has enough unity of time, action and place and does feel quite suited to theatre. As it is, I am not sure what Toibin sought to achieve with this novel. It was admiration for his prose that kept me going until the end rather than a compelling plot. His 2012 novel The Testament of Mary had a similar premise; a key iconic figure from religion is reimagined without reference to a deity. Yet that novel was mesmerising. Mary burned with injustice, with grief, with anger at how her life had been. After the strong opening episode, House of Names fades rapidly. Somehow Toibin managed to make one of the most truly dysfunctional families in history ... dull. It pains me to say this of a writer who I rate so highly but alas, somewhere Toibin lost his way within this house.

Agamemnon sacrifices his oldest child Iphegenia, his wife Clytemnestra murders him for revenge, then their remaining children Electra and Orestes plot the murder of their mother. The book is written in the alternating points of view of Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes. It’s strange for story about a chain of revenge killings to feel passive, but this retelling of a Greek myth never felt as gritty as I wanted. Maybe the writing was too dreamy and lyrical for me or maybe it was based on a version of the myth with which I was not familiar. In any event, I liked the book but didn’t love it, but it did make me want to read the “Oresteia” by Aeschylus so that’s a positive thing. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

The writing is great but the story lagged for me. And I've seen plays performed in Greece in Greek so it's not that I'm unfamiliar with the story or didn't know what I was getting into... actually maybe that is why it didn't strike home with me. I don't always approve of retellings.

When I saw this book on NetGalley, I chose it because I read Brooklyn and Nora Webster; but this book was something else entirely. A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra, this isn't something I would normally go for, but I live in a house with Greek mythology fans, and they are obviously starting to affect my choices. Not really what I would expect from Toibin either, by the way, but I am convinced now that he can write anything he wants; this story is compelling, and, in some ways, prescient. If it weren't for Toibin's name attached to this story, I probably wouldn't have picked it up at all, though it does have a beautiful cover. (I prefer the red one on Goodreads - BookLikes has its usual limited number of editions - 1 for this one, unfortunately...) I admit, absent of any other information, I do still sometimes judge a book by its cover. In any case, if you feel the way I do, stretch a bit and try this one — there are some graphic moments, but it is a powerful story, and Toibin does not disappoint.


For Goodreads:

Why I picked it — Because I loved Toibin's other books
Reminded me of…Greek mythology stories, and some of the grittier Bible stories!
For my full review — click here

I should have read the blurb before I requested this on NetGalley, as I'm not a fan of mythology, but I saw Colm Toibin was the author, so I clicked the Request button.

It's unfortunate that the first Toibin book I read was this one, as I just couldn't get into it.

The writing is superb, no doubt about it.

It's the story that is the problem, or my brain not being able, or better said, willing to reconcile the gruesome past with the present realities. I'm sorry to say, I see no point in these mythological stories, reimagined or not, besides being self-indulgent exercises for the authors to showcase their writing prowess.

I have nothing against re-imaginings, re-interpretations, as long as they stand alone on their own feet. I don't think that my disenchantment with this novel had anything to do with my not knowing the original stories.

I did feel the characters' pain, anguish, fear, need for revenge because of Toibin's beautiful writing. It's just that I didn't want to read about a father ordering his daughter's sacrifice so that the gods would blow wind into their sails so they could go to sea and battle others.

The female characters, the mother, Clytemnestra, and her younger daughter, Electra, were much better developed. Their POVs were stronger. Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, has a voice in this novel as well. His POV was less affecting.

So, while I can't say this novel was riveting, it worked as an enticement to read something else by Toibin.

Colm Toibin is making a thorough study of motherhood in so many guises. I did not enjoy this as much as The Testament of Mary, but it is still a finely written book. Tragic and disturbing, yet the various voices pulled me away from the (very active) plot. Toibin's work is so thoughtful and planned that I'm sorry I didn't enjoy it more.

This book reads as a grim, artful, and imaginative retelling of the stories of Agamemnon's return, Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes. Each chapter switches character perspective which serves as an interesting look into intention and motive that we often don't get in the telling of these ancient tales. Despite the fact that Toibin humanizes these mythical characters - some of them notorious monsters - he maintains a cold distance from the narrative that sets a wonderfully creepy and clinical tone for the dark deeds that take place and feels very appropriate. I appreciate how Toibin fleshes out the potential in these complicated and rich characters who are elsewhere often seen as 2 dimensional archetypes simply defined by their actions. We see in them the capacity for a gamut of emotions including fear, insecurity, love, sadness - all grounding this in a kind of psychological reality that makes the stories of infanticide, matricide, homicide so much more terrifying and real than I've ever read them before.

This review is coming months on the tail of the book's release, but I can highly recommend these chilly, slower nights as the perfect time for delving into this one.

This book was everything I wanted it to be. It captures the feeling of a time and place in history that feels authentic and ... Greek. There is a certain aura around characters from Greek literature that I think Toibin has maintained while making the book and its characters feel relevant in the 21st century. This novel proves that these stories don't get old for us.

FANTASTIC retelling of a Greek tragedy, in a manner that only Tobin could produce! I absolutely love this book and bought a hard copy.

The Ancient Greeks didn’t invent murder, sex, and vengeance, but they did realize the staying power of stories centering on them. As apparently does Colm Toibin, whose newest work, House of Names, is a retelling of the House of Atreus tale involving Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, and Orestes (spoiler alert—it’s not a happy story). Nor does Toibin bother to dress it up in contemporary garb, eschewing the usual “updating” into modern times and dress. Though perhaps that’s not wholly accurate.

While Toibin keeps the classical setting, he strips the story of one of the aspects that made it so Greek—the gods. Whereas Aeschylus and the other Greek dramatists placed the gods at the center of things, as prime movers, as judges, Toibin replaces them here with inner psychology (and what could be more modern than that?).

That’s not to say the gods aren’t mentioned. When Clytemnestra finds out that her daughter Iphigenia is to be sacrificed, she’s told it’s to appease the gods and free Agamemnon’s fleet to sail off to war. But she’ll have none of that:

I was sure, fully sure, that I did not believe at all in the power of the gods . . . If the gods did not watch over us, I wondered, then how should we know what to do? Who else would tell us what to do? I realized then that no one would tell us, no one at all, no one would tell me what should be done in the future or what should not be done. In the future, I would be the one to decide what to do, not the gods.

Of course, we all know what she decides to do is kill her husband when he returns from the war. Something that’s actually already happened by the time we get those liens above, since this is all told in flashback, the novel beginning post murder with the wonderfully chilling opening line: “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” The murder of Agamemnon comes not from the gods but from easy-to-understand anger over his own murder of their child. Just as later in the story Electra’s plotting against her mother derives from Clytemnestra’s murder of her father. And so responsibility for the cycle of violence and atrocity that is the story’s theme lies not with the gods but with the all-too-human actors.

Toibin plunges us into both woman’s interiors via a tight first-person POV, Clytemnestra’s in a more arch, classical voice and Electra’s more down to earth if no less fierce. We learn their motivations, see their calculations, the way they turn on and off their violent thoughts and actions in a chilling fashion. While each actively plots (and achieve their desired results) they are as well wholly constrained, both of them by the male power of Aegisthus and by the shadows of the past (Electra somewhat literally as she tells us she speaks with them regularly).

Meanwhile, Orestes’ story makes up the rest of the book’s six sections. Here Toibin brings his creative gifts to bear as the original stories never tell us where Orestes spent his time between his father’s murder and his mother’s. Toibin has him abducted by Aegisthus and then escaping to a little lone cottage with two other former prisoners. Orestes’ story is told through third-person POV rather than first. This makes him a more passive character, which perhaps is a purposeful flipping of the male/female roles, or maybe it’s meant as commentary on how the cycle of vengeance and atrocity which is the theme of the story lies not only at the feet of those who directly perform the horrid acts but the more passive people as well—those who simply “follow orders,” do what they’re led to or told to do as Orestes does, whether he’s following his sister’s lead or his more active and charismatic friend Leander (another addition to the myth).

The way Toibin moves beyond a tight focus on the immediate family members broadens the tragedy and the violence. The countryside is destroyed by the civil war and tyranny, village after village is emptied of life; mothers bemoan the loss of children dragged off to fight in battles not of their making; wives, grandparents, cousins, sisters, brothers, all become victims as they’re used as pawns in the greater game. Somewhat ironically, I found myself much more moved by these outside-the-House characters. And it is one of these—Leanders’ sister, raped and left for dead, who offers a hint of an end to the cycle.

Otherwise, I was surprised at how flat much of the book felt to me, once I moved past Clytemnestra’s opening section, which I thought brilliantly forceful and compelling. For all we’re in the head of Electra, it’s never quite clear to me why she feels the way she does; her father after all did kill her sister. And Orestes’ passivity, combined with the more distant third-person POV, makes it difficult for his character to grab the reader. Meanwhile, the setting itself acted somewhat as a barrier to full entry into the tale as it never felt fully there, instead comes at us in random, vague encounters, often violent ones. Had I not known the source of the tale, I’m pretty sure I would never have placed this story in Ancient Greece, neither the time nor the place. Orestes’ imprisonment, for example, felt like it could have been a boarding school run by harsh priests. Perhaps, like Orestes’ passive nature, this is purposeful on Toibin’s part—making the point maybe that this cycle of violence is all too universal and all too timeless, but thinking that doesn’t make the setting any more vividly engaging.

There’s a lot to admire in House of Names, particularly in Clytemnestra’s voice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I ended with a sense of disappointment. I felt often as I were straining to reach some stronger response, some more powerful connection with the themes and characters, almost to do just that, but then my hands would pass right through it like mist or the ghosts of the dead and I’d have to start all over again. A disappointing Toibin novel is still a work that will reward in places and one that will leave you thinking about it well after you’ve closed the last page, but I can’t help but feel this was a missed opportunity.

I have very little experience with Greek Mythology and even less with Colm Toíbin. I have not read anything by him in the past even though I am familiar with Brooklyn (but never read it). I requested this book because it was so far outside of my comfort zone and I really wanted to give it a fair shot. In general I love retelling of all kinds, and I did like certain parts of this book a lot. Clytemnestra is a really compelling character and really epitomizes the length a mother will go for a child.
This book boiled down to the quote " and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", because this book is essentially a revenge story. Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes all have their own motivations for their actions but it all relates back to revenge and murder. While this was an interesting detour from my regular diet of YA books, I don't see myself settling into Adult Fiction anytime soon.

“As flies to wanton schoolboys are we to the gods”…..? (King Lear)

It is always a deep delight to submerge into a book by Tóibín, whether he is writing about modern times and places, or is deep within a past which is so long ago that it has become part of mythology, where whatever was ‘real’ has accreted metaphor and patterned story over itself.

Here Tóibín is engaged with the latter, the deep past, a dark, terrifying place which is perhaps, part history, part long ago tales where history is entwined with the mysterious gods, where the workings out of the divisions between ‘fate’ and free will, lie. Morality, justice, retribution, deep lore, deep taboos. Whose laws, not to mention whose lores, and whose taboos are we observing or breaking?

House of Names is the story being played out in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a play dating from some 500 years before the Christian Era. This is also a story told in Homer’s Iliad, so the narrative would have been known to the audience. In keeping with this tradition, Tóibín prefaces his story by letting the reader know what the narrative events were. We, like the play’s audience, need not to be distracted from ‘why and how’ by ‘what happens next’ in this story of the curse of the House of Atreus.

Clytemnestra: “It was the fire that brought the news, not the gods. Among the gods now there is no one who offers me sustenance or oversees my actions or knows my mind. There is no one among the gods to whom I appeal. I live alone in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.

I am praying to no gods. I am alone among those here because I do not pray and will not pray again. Instead I will speak in ordinary whispers. I will speak in words that come from the world, and those words will be filled with regret for what has been lost”

Clytemnestra kills her warrior husband King Agamemnon, and has plotted his death for some years, with her lover Aegisthus. Monstrous Clytemnestra, we might think. Except, this is deep revenge, or even, retribution, and is a dish served very cold of some years in the making, following a monstrous act committed by Agamemnon – the sacrifice of his (and Clytemnestra’s) young daughter Iphigenia. This was apparently a demand made by the goddess Artemis, whom Agamemnon offended. The goddess promises victory in war if this sacrifice is made. Agamemnon tricks Clytemnestra into bringing their young daughter to where the army is waiting. The Queen believed her daughter was going to be married to the heroic and idolised Achilles. Instead, she has brought her daughter to a funeral, not to a wedding at all. Monstrous Agamemnon. The King and Queen had other, younger children, and two of them are major players in a continuing, horrible history. Electra is the younger daughter, not the favoured one. Orestes, still a young boy, idolises, like Electra, father over mother. The final act of a tragedy of the daughter murdered by the father, the husband murdered by his wife, to avenge the daughter, will be the son, helped by his sister, killing the mother to avenge the killing of the father.

Clytemnestra: “If the gods did not watch over us, I wondered, then how should we know what to do? Who else would tell us what to do? I realised that no one would tell us, no one at all, no one would tell me what should be done in the future or what should not be done. In the future, I would be the one to decide what to do, not the gods”

These Ancient Greeks are deeply, terrifyingly dysfunctional in this tale, clearly, but their ‘role’ is also to show aspects of human nature, to make the audience/listener/reader engage in weighty thought, felt and inhabited debate on questions of morality, justice, free will versus ‘destiny in the stars’

Electra : “I gravitate from their world, the world of speech and real time and mere human urges, towards a world that has always been here. Each day, I appeal to the gods to help me prevail. I appeal to them to oversee my brother’s days and help him return, I appeal to them to give my own spirit strength when the time comes. I am with the gods in their watchfulness as I watch too”

And how wonderfully this dark tale is served by Tóibín, who can take small lives, the lives of ordinary people and make them stand for thousands (Nora Webster) and, as here, operatic, mythic lives, possibly the movers and shakers of history, and bring them to a scale where they become recognisably human like ourselves.

The style of the telling is curious, and interesting. The female protagonists, Clytemnestra and Electra are given a first person narrative. Orestes, first as a young adolescent, later as a young man has his history and point of view told in the third person.

The effect of this is that though inevitably females in this society have far less obvious power, both Clytemnestra and Electra watchfully wait, plan and instigate action, of their own volition. Their identities become clear to themselves. Clytemnestra is allowed to speak for her own case, in this ‘I’ voice, and the reader can follow a coherence in the character, however much the actions of others may thwart her. And Electra, although initially much less powerful, feeling herself with less autonomy, more an instrument of fate decided by the gods, is repeatedly shown as developing her mother’s steely resolve. She moves steadily into taking her own power, a sense of the will of ‘I’ ; ‘I’ decide, ‘I’act, ‘I’ take responsibility.

Orestes' story is third person. Although he is the one to strike the killing blow, right from the start, by the third person voice, in contrast, is a kind of inability to take ownership and coherence for self. I found this a brilliant stylistic way to underline the character aspects Tóibín suggests for Orestes. And, curiously, this stirred my pity, most, for him. That small child, desperately seeking approval from male role models, father figures, as he ‘plays soldiers’ continues in the later Orestes section, where we see him as young man. Writing method underlined personality and psychology

Orestes : “We live in a strange time,” Electra said “A time when the gods are fading. Some of us still see them but there are times when we don’t. Their power is waning. Soon it will be a different world. It will be ruled by the light of day. Soon it will be a world barely worth inhabiting. You should feel lucky that you were touched by the old world, that in that house it brushed you with its wings”

He did not know how to reply to this…….Instead, he listened carefully……He wondered about the accuracy of what she said……..he did not mention this”

House of Names took me further into a fascination I already had with Ancient Greece, which seems so very far away and alien on one level, but, on another could be seen as close and accessible. As I read, particularly in the early Orestes section, I thought of more modern times, of recent conflicts, where rough justice, outwith the rule of law, is meted out; individuals, performing honour killings, factions united around shades of ideological beliefs, both secular and faith based, around nationalisms and ethnicities, taking the blade, the gun, the explosive device into their own hands, carrying out killings to ‘serve’ some ideology or another. Is this any different from ‘actions put in train by fate, serving curses and retributions laid down by the gods’ That eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, you killed mine, I kill yours, you then kill mine in revenge and retribution for my action in killing yours, which was my revenge and retribution for your killing of mine.

And, of course, all these many layers and continued thinking Tóibín brought me to, happened subliminally. He does not feel didactic to me but somehow seeps his characters, his worlds into mine.

I was delighted to receive this as a digital version for review from the publishers via NetGalley

Mr. Toibon is a very good writer. However, the story didn't strike me. I found it to be a disturbing and gruesome read. However, I look to reading more of his works in the future.

The House of Names is based on the story of Clytemnestra’s revenge on her husband Agamemnon after he arranges the murder their daughter Iphignia.
Colm Toibin guides the characters towards their tragic destinies with calm and disciplined prose. The first part of the book is full of plots, assassinations and righteous anger. Clytemnestra joins the ranks of Toibin’s faultless female character portrayals, with her shrewdness and leadership, but still out-maneuvered by the cunning Aegisthus.
But the pace falters when Orestes, Clytemnestra’s son, becomes the focus. When he is sent away to safety as the strike is made against Agamemnon, Orestes’ future and that of the story becomes a little vague. This reader is left uncertain whether Orestes’ is a heartless killer, a sexual ingenue (with females) or a clever potential leader, when the story just stops rather than ends, by necessity.
Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for the copy.

This book is a retelling of the Greek mythology about Clytemnestra and her children Orestes and Electra. It is told in different chapters from the point of view of each of them. We first witness Clytemnestra's agony when her daughter is sacrificed to the God by her husband Agamemnon. We follow her as she murders him to avenge her daughter. We watch as Orestes is kidnapped and fights to survive in order to return home to his mother, his horror at discovering her crime and finally killing her himself. We witness Ekectra's worship of her father that leads her to encourage Orestes's crime and her climb to power afterwards. I was fascinated by the story as it all unfolded. I was disappointed with the ending, however, as it leads to so many questions. I am wondering if there is a sequel? I was inspired to go back and revisit the mythology

This book was absolutely spectacular! Thank you for the opportunity to read and rate it!

This is a retelling of the stories of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. It is a bloody story of a family turning on itself with murderous intent. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes but the female characters have first-person narratives, allowing them to put their stories forward in their own words. Orestes is subject to a second-person narrative with his words chosen for him, reflecting the lack of power he wields in the tale. His mother and sister are ruthless agents of change, he is portrayed as a pawn being manipulated by the strong women in his life.
This is an interesting read. Colm Toibin is a beautiful writer. Having read the stunning Brooklyn I was intrigued to see what he could do in the completely different field of rewriting Greek tragedy – I was not disappointed. He has produced an innovative novel through familiar stories.