Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I am reviewing Alcestis by Katharine Beutner. This book was first released in 2010, and it won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction in 2011 and was a finalist for both the BSFS Compton Crook Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction. Visit the author’s website here.
Poor Alcestis.
Brave Alcestis.
Strong Alcestis.
Poor, for having a husband that does not deserve her.
Brave, for accepting a fate that was not her own.
And strong, for having the will to face such a fate where others (Admetus) were cowards.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I am saddened that it is not as popular as The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, or A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes because this book deserves the hype and so much more.
Others have crowded around, trying to touch her, to speak to her, to hold her in the mortal world—but still she looks up, away. She is waiting for death to come and claim her; she’s been waiting all her life.
When this book begins, Alcestis is eight years old, and she lives in the same room where she and her sisters were born in, in the palace of Iolcus, close to the female servants’ quarters; the same room, coincidentally, where Alcestis’ mother died giving birth to her. And in these first few chapters we are shown how royal women in Ancient Greece once lived, how they lived in the shadow of the men who possessed them (first their father, and then their husband) and how they were seen but not seen; how they were locked away not to be seen at all until the day they could fulfill the one thing daughters were supposed to do: marry the man they were told to, or to whom they had been betrothed to. And once married, women were expected to bear children to keep their position; if they did not give their husbands an heir, the less likely it was for them to maintain that position and they could easily be replaced by another. Also, women had to fight to maintain their husband’s affection, if he ever showed them any, sometimes even against the gods themselves. Their entire lives, women in Ancient Greece fought against the fate allotted to them: that of always belonging to a man, whether it be their father or husband, never to oneself, and of disappearing both in life and death, of not being important enough to be recognized as someone who is alive or who once lived. This is expertly portrayed in both of Alcestis’ sisters. Psidice, for example, wants nothing more than to marry and be the mistress of her own household (thus disappearing from Alcestis’ life) and Hippothoe, who dies from asthma when Alcestis is only a child and likewise disappearing from her younger sister’s life.
This was why Persephone had kept her from me: to keep from me the truth of death. I had only been stopped, hovering, waiting to return to life. But death was the land Persephone ruled, and to this land I would come, as an old woman, to be her subject. And I too would become exactly like the others. I wouldn’t know Hippothoe or Tyro or Tiresias; I wouldn’t know Persephone. She would look on me as I looked on Hippothoe now, her love absorbed and reflected as blankness. She would know me as I had been and see me as I was. That was the nature of a god’s sight.
Death is a central theme in this book, and the author’s portrayal of the Greek underworld is one of the best things of this novel. Alcestis is no stranger to death; she is familiar with it, and she feels safe surrounded by it. After all, it has taken more from her than life itself has ever given her. Death took both her mother and sister, Anaxibia and Hippothoe, respectively, from her, whilst life has yet to give her the child she needs to secure her position as Admetus’s wife and Queen of Pherae, whilst also having to vie against Apollo for her husband’s affection. And though Alcestis does love her husband, I did not think that she “loved her husband so much that she died to save his life and was sent to the underworld in his place,” to quote the synopsis of the book. Granted, I have not read the original myth, but in the book Alcestis goes to the underworld to save herself from Admetus’ weakness and cowardice, and the life of rejection, which would make her eventually to disappear, that it would bring her: “[…It was a weak little noise, the sound made by a slapped child. If this went on much longer, it would not matter if he did go with Hermes in the end—he would be remembered only as the king who’d tried to use a god’s (Apollo’s) favor to cheat death, and I would be his cowardly woman who whimpered over his body. His shame would doom me to starve. His parents might house me out of pity, but when they died I would be cast out of Pherae, and Pelias would never take me back, not when my husband has brought dishonor to all of Tyro’s children. I might rely on the hospitality of strangers, but no Achaean man would wed me, stained as I would be by Admetus’s weakness. I’d wander aimless and alone; it would be a death on earth.” And Admetus is weak. Despite having been introduced as a man willing to face the son of a god (Pelias) for Alcestis’s hand in marriage, later we learn that Admetus is anything but, only having bested Pelias with the help of a god. He is a man with the epitome qualities of a woman (sad that this is how a woman was thought of in Ancient Greece), and thus most attractive to the gods for their sexual liaisons, given that it is thought that men (and gods) preferred other men over women for their carnal relations. But Admetus is also Alcestis’s counterpart. Where she is strong and brave, he is both weak and a coward, and the scene where Hermes comes to Pherae to take him to the underworld (the scene where the previous quote was taken from) is one of the best scenes of the entire book because it shows this difference between Alcestis and Admetus clearly.
In Greek mythology, Alcestis is known as the ideal wife, as Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, for example, is known as the faithful wife (even though Odysseus was most certainly not faithful to her). But more than an ideal wife, I would say that Alcestis is the wife that she sacrifices everything, even her own life, to exist. She is sacrifice. That is why she is so strong, and I really enjoyed reading her story and why she was willing to make such a sacrifice.
I pressed my hands over my mouth and shook, my shoulders heaving, hot all over with the horror of missing her. Spring would come and she would be freed—but I would watch the trees green from this chamber, feel the warm breeze only in the hallways, the courtyard, the frame of the window. Every year I would watch, and I would know that she has come among us again, in the world above, come to live with her lonely mother. She would leave Hades behind, but she would not spend her springs and summers locked in my arms or lazing in my bed. The men would not allow it, not for two women watched as carefully as we would be. They would hold us to our promises, keep us in our marriages, the places we were given as girls and must sorrow in as women. And I would miss her in every fruit and every flower, every pain and every poison, every bit of rot.
Finally, I have to say something about this author’s superb portrayal of the king and queen of the underworld. Hades and Persephone have always intrigued me, and in this book Persephone is a gem. She is not meek, and she knows what she wants, something that I suspect she learned from her husband. But in her own way, she is also gentle and caring to those she loves. And for the longest time while I was reading this book, I tried to understand Alcestis’ and Persephone’s relationship, and why Hades accepted it. And I understood that Persephone did love Alcestis as Alcestis understood, upon leaving the underworld, that she too loved Persephone despite Persephone’s flighty and mercurial nature, which at times made Alcestis want her more than anything else, and at other times, hate her as she had not hated before. But by bringing Alcestis’ and Persephone’s relationship to the forefront, the author questions why it was okay for men (and male gods) to love and be in love with an object of their affection of the same sex, while it was shameful (to quote Heracles) for two women (even though one was a goddess) to love each other as Apollo loved Admetus and to aspire to be anything else other than the wife of a man and the mother of other men? This is something to think about. And that is something that this book makes you do: think about this and other issues concerning women and the lives they lived in Ancient Greece. This is why I gave this book an A New Favorite rating and recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading books of this kind.
