Snakehead

This is a retelling of the Perseus myth – his beheading of the snake-headed Medusa, and his rescue of Andromeda from the rock of sacrifice. Much of Halam’s version concerns the earlier life of Perseus on the island of Serefos, where he found sanctuary with his mother Danae after they were expelled from Argos. The fisherman Dictys, who in the classical story saved mother and child from the sea, is here the older brother of the king of Serefos, displaced from his throne but allowed by King Polydectes to live more or less autonomously in the coastal settlement of Seatown, where he runs a taverna. In Snakehead Andromeda, too, has a time as refugee on Serefos, before the episode of sacrifice and rescue for which she is famous, so the various elements of the Perseus myth are unusually linked together.

The shift of the main action to Serefos allows Halam to set ancient and modern Greece alongside each other, with some fine comic effects. The home and business that Perseus, Danae and Andromeda share with Papa Dicty, the bad King’s brother, is exactly like a present-day Greek taverna (even down to the menu). When the god Zeus appears to Perseus, he does so in a modern tycoon’s luxury yacht, and even has the cheek to claim fish and chips as his own invention. There is also an ancient Greek shipping magnate called Taki. As a comedy of myth and modernity the book works very well. The love story between Perseus and Andromeda is effective, too, and so are the mischievous, capricious gods. What is lost is the sense of spectacular heroism and danger in the original. This is a humanist, scaled-down, domesticated version for our times. Halam’s Perseus is not half a god, but one of us. The mixture of old and new does not quite work overall, but it contains some clever and amusing ideas, and some people you might well meet on a package holiday to Greece.