Weight of the World

It rarely happens that the books I pick up to read chime so well with how I'm feeling. Yesterday, I was interviewed along with a great many other people to see if I deserved to keep the job I've done for almost three years. Today, five people from our smallish office finished up and we said good-bye, wondering what would happen next. Next week, I've triple booked myself for meetings to sort things out before everyone else disappears to far-flung places. I'm fretting about the usual family burdens of meeting everyone's impossible expectations for Christmas and I can't sleep.

Last night, I picked up Weight by Jeanette Winterson a wonderful poetic retelling of the story of Atlas, the Titan bearing the weight of the cosmos on his shoulders. This is part of a series of various authors retalling classical mythology for Text publishing. A.S.Byatt, Margaret Atwood and Donna Tartt are amongst the many people who've contributed to the series but I haven't seen their books yet.

I've said in other places that Winterson's work can be quite baroque and inpenetrable. This, on the other hand, is deceptively simple prose that works on at least two levels - sometimes metaphysical, sometimes literally. (You're really entirely sure where Atlas is standing when he's holding up the universe.) The book opens with the start of the world, geological time and talks about the layers of sedimentary rock as pages of a story, where things get trapped.

Atlas is the child of the earth and the sea who produced him from an extended coupling when the sea covered an island for 36 hours. For a while, he tills the earth and raises a family. But then he's punished for taking part in the war between gods and titans by being forced to carry the cosmos. A long time later, Heracles needs his help. He borrows the load for a while and then tricks Atlas into taking it back. Atlas knows he's made choices to accept his punishment but wonders why he obeys the gods. In between these bits, the gods and heroes behave badly and the real world moves on.

Winterson interweaves this bits with sections in her (pseudo)autobiographical voice to show how she's been carrying far too much around with her for too long and she wants to put it down. Writing this story is meant to help. I hope it did. This is a wonderful meditation on life and love and the choices we make that set our paths. It's a lovely way of using the myth.

I've always loved retellings of classical mythology eg Alan Garner's series of at least three books (The God beneath the Sea? Heracles?) were some of my favourite books as a kid. I was really disappointed at uni to find out how badly written or inaccessible the original versions of the myths are. (And it's such a relief to read something GOOD after a week of dodgy SF even I'm too embarrassed to blog about.)