Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody descends into implausibility
- Written by Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia
When I was a doctoral candidate at Oxford, I spent much of my time working in the papyrology rooms. Usually, my only company was the curator, a kind and learned Sardinian woman who is now a professor at the University of Milan.
One day, the news was that a famous novelist was coming to visit the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection. “Have you heard of him?” the curator asked.
I had, but I’d never read his work.
“He has asked to be given a tour of the collection.”
The name of the famous novelist was Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi. He said that he was researching a new book, in which Oxford’s papyrus collection would feature prominently.
Review: Son of Nobody – Yann Martel (Text Publishing)
Several years after Martel’s visit to Oxford, that book has now appeared. Son of Nobody is about a Canadian scholar named Harlow Donne who wins a one-year fellowship to go to Oxford to work on papyri with the eminent scholar Franklin Cubitt.
To take up the “unbelievable opportunity” of the fellowship, Harlow has to leave behind his wife and daughter in Canada. The relationship is already, as he says, “on the rocks”. The news about the fellowship sets off a full couple’s argument:
And so it started, as it always did, with the appearance of a single pinpoint of resentment that called forth another pinpoint, then another and another, tit for tat, until, out of nothing, in the evening quiet of a bedroom, shimmered the complete outline of a domestic dispute, a bright constellation of infinite acrimony.
The argument establishes the main tension in the novel. There is Harlow, the scholar, far away pursuing his interests and career ambitions, and there is his wife and daughter back in Canada, becoming estranged. The whole book is addressed to his daughter, Helen.
The Psoad
At Oxford, Harlow is set to work on a bunch of papyrus fragments given to him by Cubitt. Two weeks after beginning this work, he discovers fragments of an epic poem containing the name Psoas, the “son of nobody”, a character from the Trojan War. He ends up finding 81 more fragments of the “Psoad” (the poem about Psoas).
There are some puzzling and implausible aspects of Martel’s depiction of other characters. Franklin Cubitt is a clichéd version of an Oxford don. He wears tweed, speaks in a posh accent, confuses Americans with Canadians, and threatens students with a cane.
He is described at the beginning of the novel as “one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri”, but later we are told he is “an economic historian by training, not a classicist”. There is no chance that someone who is not a trained classicist would become a “foremost” scholar of papyri.
Similarly, Harlow is working on a PhD. We are told he is a complete “newbie” to papyrology who has never edited a text before. The odds that such a novice would be given an epic poem in fragments to edit on his own are impossible.
You could say it’s just a novel, so these implausibilities don’t matter. But even if you overlook the mistakes and the clichés about academic life, the main story, in which Harlow describes the breakdown of his marriage for his daughter, is self-involved and contrived.
It is good that Martel wants to draw attention to the world of Oxyrhynchus and the fascinating process of editing and reconstructing ancient texts on papyrus. But I can’t help but conclude that Son of Nobody needed more work before publication. It seems to me like a first draft of an interesting idea, not a polished final product. This is a pity, because there was plenty of potential in the novel’s premises.
Authors: Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia
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