Tell us about your new novel, No Friend to this House
It’s a retelling of the voyage of the Argo, the quest for the Golden Fleece. The Argonauts arrive in Colchis to find their only hope of success is to plead for the help of a priestess and witch named Medea. What could possibly go wrong?
Medea is the first Greek play you saw, starring Diana Rigg, and you’ve since seen about 30 versions. What makes it so special?
This tragedy was first performed in 431 BC, and the monologue given by Medea at the start of the play – on the disastrous disparity between men and women in a marriage – was so resonant that it was being quoted at suffrage meetings more than two millennia later. It’s still performed in multiple languages every year: I saw a spectacular Japanese version earlier this summer. The story of a warring couple who weaponise their children against one another is one that never stops being relevant.
Many people know the story best through Ray Harryhausen’s 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts but how faithful a version is it?
It’s sufficiently close to the version in Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica that he has a screenwriting credit on the Internet Movie Database, no mean feat for someone who died 2,000 years before cinema was invented. The movie minimises the role of Medea, which is a shame. But who now thinks of the Earthborn Warriors without imagining them as grinning skeletons? That was Harryhausen’s innovation, and it has scared us for more than 60 years.
There is an entire genre now of feminist retellings but that glosses over how many different genres myth can encompass.
Myths contain multitudes and always have. The Trojan war gives us epic war story (The Iliad), grand adventure and homecoming (The Odyssey), and heartbreaking tragedy (Euripides’s Trojan Women). I love to take a myth and unpick it from different directions: No Friend to This House is a quest story, a love story and a revenger’s tragedy, and all of those elements are present in the myth from its earliest tellings.
RM Block
This is a myth where women take action: the first uprising against the patriarchy recorded anywhere in myth
The Lemnian Women take an extraordinary revenge on their menfolk after the men abandon them for other women. Their collective action is so shocking to our ancient authors that the phrase “Lemnian deeds” meant “criminal activity” to the ancient Greeks. So my advice is that you never insult a woman from Lemnos, just in case.
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics is on its 11th series. How did this niche subject find a huge audience worldwide?
I don’t know! I can’t believe we’ve been making it for 11 years. I do work really hard to pack each episode with as much material – information, analysis, jokes, everything – as I can. And I talk really fast, so it’s a lot.
What does it mean to open up classics to everyone, when for centuries it was the preserve of public schoolboys?
It means more people have access to our collective past. If classics wasn’t so great, public schools wouldn’t be charging to teach it. I hope my books and programmes allow more people to experience the thrill of learning about ancient societies. I’m aware I was beyond lucky to be able to study this at school, so I have tried to pass a little bit of that luck onwards.
Tell us about A Thousand Ships, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020
It’s my heart song. And it was shortlisted at the beginning of the first lockdown in England, so I had this wonderful secret to keep me warm while it felt like the world was ending. People say that prizes aren’t everything, and they’re right. But being shortlisted for this one was a lovely experience.
Which projects are you working on?
A nonfiction book about monsters in Greek myth is what I write next and then I will start work on series 12 of the radio show.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Every trip to Greece is a literary pilgrimage for me! But I am so committed to Euripides that I went to Cleveland last summer to see an Ancient Greek pot featuring a scene from his Medea. So even Ohio isn’t too far for my love.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Read it aloud. NB in private, not eg in a cafe.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
Leaf-blowers are banned. Use a rake. These are the only ears I have.
Your most treasured possession?
I own a cell from the original series of Danger Mouse, it has DM and Penfold running through a forest.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
A Folio edition of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live over train tracks, so noise is the worst thing about where I live. On the plus side, transport links are excellent and I can almost never hear leaf-blowers.
What is your favourite quotation?
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack” – from Antony and Cleopatra. Sometimes the fact that the world doesn’t stop when someone you love dies seems genuinely incomprehensible to me.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Snoopy. His complex inner life is a model for us all. Also, he writes novels with gusto.
No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes is published by Mantle
