Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

Homer’s Iliad, the most famous account of the Trojan War, focuses on gods, heroes and great warriors – but what if there was another version, written from the perspective of the ordinary people, the ‘sons of nobody’? Yann Martel explores this idea in his new novel, the first I’ve read since Life of Pi, which I loved. I enjoyed this one as well; it’s an unusual and ambitious book, but it worked for me. The novel is narrated by Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic whose area of interest is Greek epics. When he receives an offer to take part in a research project at Oxford University, he sees it as the opportunity of a lifetime and leaves his wife and daughter behind in Canada to travel to England alone and take up his new position. At Oxford, Harlow begins to study the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts, and comes across some fragments of what appears to be the story of a man called Psoas of Midea and an alternative account of the events of the Iliad. Psoas is not a…