Summerlong

"Summerlong ties in really well with Hadestown , because again it is a Hades and Persephone who have been married for a long time. In this version Persephone hasn’t grown older with Hades; they’ve stayed the ages they are in the traditional myth. So she’s still very young and beautiful and fresh, and he’s old and grizzly. They interfere with a pair of mortals. There’s a couple in their late fifties, early sixties. They’re not married. They’ve just settled into a really good life together – they’ve had other lives before, and now they’re in their golden years, and they’ve found each other and settled into something that’s really good for them. It’s beautiful. And then the gods show up… which feels very classic Greek mythology. First it’s Persephone, who in the book is known as Lioness, who comes to earth fleeing Hades; she’s had enough. She arrives and works as a waitress, and everyone notices her, and she starts to split their relationship up. And then Hades shows up looking for her. He has a thing with the woman, but he’s so clearly doing it to hurt Persephone/Lioness, and he makes it so clear that he has absolutely no interest in this woman – he does not make her feel good about herself. During the encounter she’s happy, but afterwards she feels her rage… It’s a really horrible but really truthful story about the gods messing with people. It takes everything from Greek mythology and brings it into the present day, and shows the real-life damage they do by messing with mortals. And of course, at the end of the book they go back to Hades, reconciled, leaving everyone behind completely, knowing full well that in a matter of years, guess where they’re going to end up, and guess who’s going to be there… It’s really dark and really lovely. It’s so beautifully written. I mean, this is Peter Beagle, the guy who did The Last Unicorn – he’s a beautiful writer. Although it apparently did not do very well – people were not thrilled with how dark it was, and how despite being speculative in the extreme, it was, in a way, un-fantastical. It deals with the mundanity of attraction and aging, and the damage people can and will do to each other to feel young, to feel wanted, to feel desire at its grubbiest. It’s the opposite of this trend of books where desire is the driving force behind things, with a purity to it: this is desire as a destructive force, a weapon, which changes things. It works so well. I read it just after the first time I saw Hadestown, and I wanted to tell people who liked the musical: try this book, because the vibes are not dissimilar. It’s gods paying big games for small prizes, with people who can’t actually afford to be playing at all. It’s a story about a seventeen-year-old girl called Corey who, unbeknownst to her, is the daughter of the goddess Demeter. Demeter ditches her on this island to hide her from the other gods. In this world, Hellenism became the dominant religion instead of Christianity; by the time the story starts, it’s faded out to the degree that Christianity has for a lot of people now. They celebrate the big-hitter festivals, and for funeral rites and weddings they follow the old scripts, but by and large most people don’t bother with it. So Corey has no idea who she is. Her mother has hidden her on this island. She’s chosen it because of its proximity to the underworld, knowing that the other gods find Hades gross and disgusting and will avoid anything underworld-related. The proximity of this island to an entrance to Hades is the perfect shield. No one is going to go near it—until Hades, the idiot boy, senses that there’s a god nearby. Hades becomes aware that she’s there, they kiss, and then that just opens a whole – well, not a literal Pandora’s box, but something not dissimilar to Pandora’s box of horrors. Because now suddenly Hermes is aware that she exists. Hades says: ‘Forget about me. You didn’t see anything, this never happened.’ But when terrible things happen to Corey’s friend Bree, the story really begins from there. I didn’t plan to write a Hades and Persephone story at first. I wanted to write something in the Greek world – that was where my tastes were at the time, probably because I was spending a lot of time listening to the Hadestown album – but I really wanted to write a Medusa story, giving her agency. I couldn’t quite nail it. I couldn’t quite get the voice, or find a way into the story. I went to a workshop with Madeline Miller, the author of Song of Achilles and Circe . I realised halfway through the class that maybe it should be Persephone I was writing about. I’ve always had a secret affinity with Persephone. My birthday is the 23rd of September, and that’s often the first day of autumn, the day that she’s going down into Hell is the day I was born. When I write stories, it happens in a strange way. I normally get images first, and I don’t know what the images relate to. So for this one, I had the image of a girl in a white dress floating face down; I had an image of a daffodil; and I had an image of an island. So there were these three specific images, and I knew the story would come – and when I knew I wanted to write about Persephone, I had a moment of realisation: ‘That’s it. That’s the story.’ It’s not about Persephone as we know her: it’s about when she was Corey, when she’s a girl who likes to garden. It’s about how she becomes Persephone. The girl lying face down became Bree, her best friend, who stole her boyfriend and left Corey in a really dark, desperate, horrible place. The island from my image became the island they lived on, but also the manifestation of the underworld, and the island that the oracle Hecate lives on too… It all just all came together. This always happens for me: once it does come together, it comes together properly, but for a while it is like being a medium and just trying to channel the images and connect the dots."