Harlow Dunn has found a chance to rewrite history – to transform himself from a footnote to an academic superstar. Dunn has discovered fragments of a story that retells Homer’s “Iliad” and the Trojan War through the experiences of a commoner, Psoas.
But in Yann Martel’s new novel “Son of Nobody,” Dunn’s pursuit of glory parallels that of the common soldiers he obsesses over, grinding on for so long that it costs him everything — his career, wife, and his beloved daughter Helen, named after the woman who supposedly caused the Trojan War.
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Martel cleverly splits the book in half: the top of every page is the story of Psoas the commoner, as Dunn has recreated it from those snippets of obscure text; the bottom is filled with Dunn’s footnotes, both the traditional kind — musing about questions of translation or historical comparisons — and the personal, as he tells us about his research, his failing marriage, his emotional turmoil and his self-justifications of all his decisions in the aftermath of everything that went wrong.
In a recent video interview, Martel said the format helped him fit all those ideas into one book in a way that would have felt forced in a single narrative. This method also breaks the fourth wall and highlights his fascination with storytelling, which fans of “Life of Pi” and his other novels will recognize.
“I also wanted to give a starring role to footnotes because each one of us is a footnote to a greater story,” Martel says.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. The psoas, or hip flexors, is called “the muscle of the soul.” How did you choose that name for your character?
The psoas is important, but invisible, like a commoner. Agamemnon would be a big muscle, like a pectoral, but Psoas is an unknown foot soldier. Yet while the psoas is a hidden muscle, it’s vital — without your psoas, you can’t move.
Q. How much were the intersections of Harlow’s and Psoas’ journeys planned out?
I consciously wanted that parallel. They’re both commoners who leave home to try and make some money or find glory, only to have their lives slowly turn to hell. That’s a Greek tragedy.
Your average novel reader is not going to war. What most of us know is a relationship that goes sour, and the one that guts you the most is a love that goes wrong. A marriage falling apart to me is very much a war writ small. It’s banal and common, but it rips you to shreds.
Q. Both Harlow and Psoas leave their families for their quest, but you seem content to have built your career around your four kids.
Well, Harlow pays a price, doesn’t he? The question I ask in the book is, “What is the worth of our work?” We should all ask ourselves that, especially Americans.
Yes, I like going to my studio at the back of my house to work on my books, but I’m always happy to stop and pick up my kids from school. And even when they drive me crazy, which they obviously do, they are the center of my world.
“Life of Pi” has done extremely well. It might live 30 years beyond my death. But unless you’re Shakespeare or Tolstoy, it’s rare that you really cross the ages. So we really live through time through our children. But I’m 62, I started late. I doubt I’ll meet my grandchildren. My grandchildren will say, “I never knew my grandfather. But you know, he wrote this book called ‘Life of Pi.’ It’s pretty good, actually, considering it’s old.” So there’s that balance that I try to make with my work and life.
Q. Harlow tells us his story after everything — work, love, family — has been destroyed. Is he more or less reliable because he’s giving import to what he found in Psoas to justify his own sacrifices?
Being a failed academic is perhaps not a bad thing because maybe he has disconnected from that bubble and is back in the real world.
Did he fabricate “The Psoas” out of little wisps he found? Surely there would have been soldiers 3,000 years ago — like in any war now — who die and wonder, “Who’s going to mourn me? Who’s going to sing my song?” Obviously, “The Psoas” is a fiction, but it’s a completely true fiction. It captures something that had been silenced.
So, I would argue that because Harlow is so beaten down and has lost everything, that makes him a more reliable narrator. In a sense, all his lies are true.
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Q. Your books often return to storytelling and the connection to and distance from reality that the stories have for people.
These ideas are a constant concern, because I want to learn how to live. I studied philosophy at university, not literature. And all the books I’ve written are to understand life.
The facts only go so far. There’s only so much you can do with a fact; everything comes with interpretation. We are a mixture of fact and fiction. And to our detriment, we tend to degrade fiction as something that is just made up, and the made-upness lessens its value, which is to completely misunderstand it.
That was the heart of “Life of Pi.” And in a sense, this is a continuation.
Q. You’ve created a fictional retelling of Homer’s saga, but you also note several times that the war itself, and the famous Trojan horse, are likely pure fiction. Why remind readers that stories can “make the facts unnecessary”?
We’re all familiar with the Trojan War, yet there’s no historical evidence for it. It’s all story and no facts, and that resembles the story of Jesus, which is also all story, no facts. That’s one of the things that got me going on this book: these two foundational texts have essentially no factual foundations. They’re all story, no history, yet they’ve completely changed history.
The Trojan War was the foundational story of the Greeks, who are the foundational thinkers of the West, and the Gospels are the foundational moral ethos of the West. But because none of this is factual, you can play with it any which way you want. You can make it your own, while there’s only so much you can play with history.
All religions are about that kind of magical thinking that goes beyond the rational. If you care to believe in Jesus, you don’t want the facts about him: it’s the Jesus of faith you want, not the Jesus of history. If you go to Troy itself, it’s a dumpy little site, and it doesn’t get you anything about the story of the Trojan War.
I’m struck at how the West is famously powerful and technological, and modernity is all about rationality. Yet with these two foundations, as I said at the very end, we walk on the feet of dreams. It’s in that dream world that we want to live.