A tour de force. An ancient epic poem. Fiction within fiction. A novel with footnotes.

Among the collections at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the narrator, Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic (as is Martel), finds fragments of potsherd and papyri from the fifth century BCE. Pieced together, they form The Psoad, written in dactylic hexameter like the Iliad. Unlike Homer’s epics in which the Trojan War is seen through the eyes of gods and royalty, The Psoad is the story of a “commoner,’ Psoas, “son of nobody.” Martel has The Psoad in the top half of the page, the annotation the bottom.

In a passage from the book that resonates today, Donne/Martel notes that the Trojan War ushered in the decline of Mycenaean Greek civilisation. “Wars do that: they cause empires to fall,” Donne writes in a footnote for his daughter.

Nine years into the war, Psoas speaks with Theristes, a fellow soldier who dares speak out against the leaders who have taken them to war:

“In battle every day I must kill good men
who have done me no wrong…
Why should I do it? Where is my reward?
…
War is the dearly loved child of gods, kings, and bards…
while we die miserable, anonymous deaths.”

Donne, in his notes, sees a parallel between the Homeric epics and Christianity. “We don’t know who Homer was, just as we don’t know who the gospel writers were.” Fascinating to ponder: “Troy: Jerusalem; Psoas: Jesus.”

Reading Son of Nobody, you might find yourself wondering: was there really a lost poem called the Psoad, or did Mantel write it. I scoured the search engines for an answer.

Classical scholars will find faults – bananas, for one, didn’t exist in ancient Greece. Whatever scholars and purists think of Son of Nobody, for we ‘commoners,’ it is a delightful, captivating read.

Buy Son of Nobody here.