The Mask of Apollo

"This is also set in Syracuse, Sicily but after the events of my novel. Democracy has fallen and Syracuse is in control of the tyrant, Dionysius, who the people of Syracuse have reluctantly accepted because he is a strong leader who provides resistance against the looming threat of Carthage. But what the novel is really about is an Athenian tragic actor, his pursuit of drama and desire to keep these plays going and reinterpret them. What it does rather interestingly is dramatize creative work within a corrupt power structure, and maybe the ambivalences or the tensions in that, because in Syracuse at that time you couldn’t operate without some degree of approval from the leader. It’s thought provoking, very well researched, and gives you a brilliant insight into the way that drama was produced. My personal favourite of Renault’s, as I’ve said, is The Last of the Wine , but The Mask of Apollo is wonderful. Yes. But, also: one of the plays reproduced in my book was the latest Euripides play at that time, Trojan Women . Many people believe Euripides wrote it as a political statement against Athens’ invasion of the small neutral island of Melos. The entire male population was executed and the women and children were sold into slavery. So, on one hand, Euripides provides an example of theatre interrogating the pressures of the present moment while seeming to provide an escape to a mythic past. This obliqueness can be of incredible value within a context where certain things are unsayable. I suppose you could argue that is also the value of mythology. That’s probably why so much of ancient Athenian drama reinterpreted these myths. By using old stories, you could find different resonances and metaphors for those things that couldn’t be addressed openly. And then, perhaps more than anything there’s just art’s capacity to provide solace and meaning to individual lives. Even if going to a play doesn’t change society, it can enrich a person’s life in ways that are difficult to quantify but which matter . Sure. I absolutely love Pat Barker and Madeline Miller’s myth inspired novels. Also, Barry Unsworth’s The Songs of Kings . Sometimes people class these novels as historical fiction, but they are mythological retellings. Exactly, with the mythological retellings you can have gods and magic, all the Homeric flights of fancy can be embraced. The story can be altered. Whereas with historical fiction you have the constraint of the historical record. In Glorious Exploits , I’ve tried to basically operate within the gaps in the historical narrative. There’s nothing in it that couldn’t have taken place. Exactly. If the supernatural appears, that might reflect the fact that you have a population of people who completely believe that the gods are around them in disguise. Like in the Middle Ages where the divine and the miraculous were simply fundamental to the world view. So who knows what people saw when they left their house—you can layer that into someone’s subjectivity. But the best mythological retellings are very good indeed. I love The Song of Achilles , but it’s something else, something different."