In the Shape of a Boar

Lawrence Norfolk

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780802193674
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"One of the year's most imaginative and challenging novels" from the acclaimed author of John Saturnall'sFeast ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Lawrence Norfolk's In the Shape of a Boar is a juggernaut of a novel, an epic tour de force of love and betrayal, ancient myths and modern horrors. The story begins in the ancient world of mythic Greece, where a dark tale of treachery and destructive love unfolds amid the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon—a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of World War II, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer on a mission of vengeance. After the war, a young Jewish Romanian refugee, Solomon Memel, who was among the hunters will create a poem based on the experience, which becomes an international literary sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love in 1970s Paris, the dark memories and horrors of those days will emerge anew. "An epic achievement... stitching together classical Greek culture and twentieth-century barbarism, the nature of human evil and the ambiguity of storytelling itself... Dazzling."— San Francisco Chronicle "Brilliant and exhaustively researched... In the Shape of a Boar is a Herculean task accomplished with bravado and style, but more than that, it's storytelling of the highest echelon."— The Hartford Courant "Wonderfully complex... a fascinating story built from layered narrative lines."— The Washington Post Book World

PART I

The Hunt for the

Boar of Kalydon

They come from the cities of Pherae and Phylace on the plain of Thessaly, from Iolcus on the Magnesian coast, Larissa and Titaeron on the banks of the Peneus. They quit Naryx and Trachis and march inland, westward, by way of the tusked peaks of Mount Oeta and the hot basins of Thermopylae.¹ Rivers lead them out of Argolis, Emathia and Locris – the Asopus, the Axius, the Cephisus – and from Megara and Athens their routes lie across the isthmus of Corinth. They sail east from Ithaca and Dulichion; west from Aegina and Salamis.

The heroes are the outposts of a shrinking country whose centre is the place of their assembly. They march towards its discovery, each step drawing the ring of the tinchel tighter about the ground where their tracks must meet. They are one another's quarry in a bloodless, preparatory hunt.

Those descending the high ridges of Taygetus or Erymanthus join those marching west from Argos and Alea, north from Amyclae, Sparta, Gerenia or Pylos. From Taenarus, on the tip of the Peloponnese, the route must pass by way of Messenia; from Messenia, Arene; from Arene, Elis. Arcadia is a mountain fastness, cool and untouched. One walks out of the thick mists of Cimmeria;² another makes the journey from Scythia.³ One takes a small boat down the Scamander to cross the Hellespont, sails south of the isles of Imbros and Samos, north of Lemnos. Mount Athos is a beacon on the triple isthmus of Paeonia. Soon the coast of Euboea, and a lucky tide or easterly wind to take him down the strait until its brine runs sweet with water from the flood of the mountain-fed Spercheus. Its mouth will be his landfall, the first since Troy.

The landscapes of their childhoods unfold green cloaks and disclose the men they have become: the horsemen⁴ and helmsmen⁵ and runners⁶ and cripples.⁷ The new terrain they tread narrows to the routes which will best bring all to the coincidence waiting in their futures. They are smooth-talkers⁸ and swindlers;⁹ thieves,¹⁰ the sons of thieves¹¹ and their accomplices too¹². Their heavy booty drags along the ground behind them. They would abandon it if they could. They steal cattle and tame horses.¹³ They ride dolphins.¹⁴ They kill centaurs.¹⁵ They are murderers¹⁶ and their victims¹⁷ and their victims’ avengers.¹⁸ They owe one another the blood in their veins; these convergent journeys represent flights from such debts and their collection. A rare respite lies ahead, in the task awaiting them, such as was found by some on the deck of the Argo, or in the dust of Iolcus, where they contested in honour of Pelias. His son is here.¹⁹ His son’s killer is here too.²⁰

They have murdered their brothers²¹ and been cleansed and betrayed.²² Their very beginnings have twinned them with the manner of their ends,²³ which will come as thunderbolts out of the bright sky and burn their images into the ground.²⁴ Their acts drag them fowards like beasts whose nature is to loathe one another: fierce lions and fiery-eyed boars yoked together in the traces, who tear up the ground and rake their drivers over the sharp stones.²⁵ The necklaces of gold which they have looped about their wives’ necks become nooses about their own, ploughing them face-first into the earth.²⁶ They watch their images decay. They feel their skins puncture and split. They bristle with their own broken bones. Their memories are the memories of old men who have seen enough of death, those who watch from the walls, who have ransomed their lives and do not care to survive their sons.²⁷

But they are sons themselves and they remember fathers other than the ones they are determined to become. Leaping out into free air to land on the far side of the culvert, one looks up to find a sunburnt arm, knuckles bunched about a chipped scythe.²⁸ Another watches the grizzled paternal head turn from the sacrifice, his fire-reddened face contorted, hand poised and twitching.²⁹ A third stares into an open mouth spilling a red mash of tendons, gristle and soft bones.³⁰ A wolf's eyes look back from behind his guiltless gaze.³¹ Their fathers are mortals with the appetites of gods,³² or gods with the appetites of men.³³

And yet here, in the gathering coincidence of the heroes’ assembly, and now, between their inevitable beginnings and ends, they may step from the tracks holding them to these destined paths. They may struggle out of the deepening furrows marked and dug by their own footprints, which would bury them deep within the earth.³⁴ They may find the kernel within themselves which cannot be destroyed.³⁵ Their straggling journeys draw them ever closer, their lines trace a new, earth-bound constellation. A tendrilled creature creates itself over the terrain's rough fibre; its inky body will mark their meeting. They are each other's destinations.

The country which yet divides them is a place of accidental transformations. Its hinterland has been foreshadowed, its instabilities prefigured. Here, brothers turn into uncles,³⁶ women may become men³⁷ and men form themselves in the harsh races of rivers, wade out and stand dripping on the banks, a minute old but full-grown.³⁸ The terrain narrows with every step. Its coordinates are their untrammelled bodies and what they do. Those who die here can do so only by fluke³⁹ or carelessness.⁴⁰

But the sons of Aeacus must survive to become the fathers of Achilles and Teucer,⁴¹ just as the son of Acrisius must once again be the father of sly Odysseus.⁴² The ground will close and inseparable allies will find themselves divided between the land of the living and the land of the dead.⁴³ They have heard their futures in the songs of halcyons and crows; they sounded like commands.⁴⁴

Their country is a spattering of enclaves now: themselves. Their bodies are kingdoms which ally themselves with their neighbours and rivals. Some merged long ago, spooned like twins in the womb,⁴⁵ smooth-surfaced and shelled like an egg.⁴⁶ The War-god bellows but his son has fled.⁴⁷ The Argo sails away from the kingdom and kingship she was built to reclaim.⁴⁸ Her captain never returns.⁴⁹

They are the actors of feats they have compelled themselves to perform and others yet awaiting them. Their footfalls shake oak trees to their roots and set off landslides and small thunderstorms. Cattle flee and sheep miscarry. They collapse limestone caverns bunkered deep beneath the earth, or glide over fields of heliotrope without bending a stalk. They wear the armour of their pasts and futures.

Look: the highlands of Taygetus and Erymanthus are deserted, the plains of Elis and Thessaly silent. They have moved on, leaving behind a seismic quiet. The armature of what they mean cases them in its brittle glaze; these are lives which can only be enacted. It will be a weary meeting when they at last look across the gulf and know they may shuck off these encrusted skins.

Almost there.

They are the generation of Heracles: only they would gather in this manner, in the luxury of this long moment. Their sons will destroy one another at Troy. They know this and know that their tale will be twisted there, betrayed by one of their own and recast as policy.⁵⁰ The sadness they will forget here is that the armour they shed must encase them again, that their names must swag themselves in epithets, that the sentences they carry will still be here on their return, patient as ferrymen and reproachful as widows. The boats will be waiting and the earth heaped.

The presences of some will leave no deeper imprint than a stylus in wet clay as it lifts and strands them, frozen in strange attitudes in the following silence. For some there will be only that.⁵¹ For others, the scratch of the quill over the papyrus's surface decrees contradictory lineages and mad progresses which will send them sailing between Argos and Colchis,⁵² drive them from the well polluted by the body of Chrysippus, or tumble them into the labyrinth which will be built by their sons. They glare in the lights from different altars and their shadows battle among themselves. But those dark spartoi are not themselves; they are competing plausibilities.⁵³

Such are the futures which tug at them, from whose grasp they have slipped to make this journey and to whose insistence they now deafen themselves with the noise of their own common purpose. As they near the gathering place they shout out their names to those arrived, to be known among them.

. . . Euthymachos, Leucippus, Ancaeus, Echion, Thersites, Antimachos, Panopeus, Iphiclus, Aphares, Evippus, Plexippus, Eurypylus, Prothous, Cometes, Prokaon, Klytius, Hippothous, Iolaos, Theseus . . .

They are heard here, this once and never again.⁵⁴ Those who survive will remember this clamour as the true beginning of the hunt. Shout follows shout until together their names raise an edifice of air in which all find shelter from the futures racing towards them, be it exile to the islands in plain view before them,⁵⁵ or to fall in the hills rising across the water,⁵⁶ to flee Trachis and be taken at Oechalia,⁵⁷ to know that their prime has passed.⁵⁸

. . . Pirithous, Enaesimus, Hippothous, Alcon, Scaeus, Dorycleus, Eutiches, Bucolus, Lycaethus, Tebrus, Eurytus, Hippocorystes, Eumedes, Alcinus, Dorceus, Sebrus, Enarophorus, Iphikles, Acastus, Peleus, Lynceus, Idas, Admetos, Amphiaraus, Podargos, Toxeus, Ischepolis, Harpaleas, Castor, Pollux . . .

The discus has been launched, thrown so high it will take decades to descend. Beautiful Hyacinthos turns to his brother, as though about to speak.⁵⁹ The heroes shout and each shout is taken up by those gathered here until their names thunder about them.

. . . Caeneus, Cepheus, Pelagon, Telamon, Laertes, Mopsos, Eurytion, Cteatus, Dryas, Jason, Phoenix, Pausileon, Thorax, Antandros, Aristandros, Simon, Kimon, Eupalamus, Lelex, Hyleus, Phyleus, Agelaus, Hippasos, Nestor, Kynortes, Meilanion . . .

The last of these ⁶⁰ shouts loud for the last of all, who is his cousin and the lone huntress admitted among their number. . . . Atalanta. ⁶¹

***

Their first hunt is for each other and now it is done. They search in one another's faces for the men behind the names. To the south, the claw of the Peloponnese grasps at the sea, its peninsular fingers reaching after the islands escaped from its coast. North is where they are destined. They look across the water.

A narrowing plain runs along the face of the far shoreline. A range of hills rises behind it and far inland lies the great spine of the Pindus. The sea glitters in their faces. On the other side of the gulf, the one who called⁶² them here is waiting.

The land drops in terraces to the shoreline; two enormous steps lead down to the water. The heroes fell stands of poplars and alders⁶³ and build boats,⁶⁴ or lash the trunks together to fashion rafts.⁶⁵ Or they call up dolphins and ride them,⁶⁶ or throw themselves with a shout into the gulf and strike out⁶⁷ for the far shore.

But they cross the water and its currents wash away their sweat and grime. Nearing land, the brine mixes with freshwater springs which bubble up from the seabed, tasting sweet after weeks of groundwater. The steep limestone peaks of Chalkis⁶⁸ and Taphiassus slide by to the east of them; the coast chosen as their landfall is a triangular lagoon fronted by a line of tiny islands.⁶⁹ Inland, the looping ridges of Mount Aracynthus rise over them. They wade through reed-beds and abandoned salt pans. As prelude to the hunt they will be feasted tonight in Kalydon.

The ground turns from mud to marsh to baked earth. The sun which steals the damp from their chitons takes with it the last taints and tangs of their journey here, the harsh woodsmoke of their campfires, the burnt fat of the animal slaughtered for good fortune when they left their hearths. That was long ago and the rain's black curtain has fallen behind them like sleep or forgetting. They come ashore in ones and twos and comb the water from their hair with their fingers: a colony of individual silences.

A dog barks. Atalanta looks up. The mud on the greaves tied about her shins is drying. She taps at it with her bowstave. She watches her black-eyed and white-haired animal nose its way out of the reeds: Aura.⁷⁰ Next she drops to one knee, gulps air into her stomach and hawks up a thin lozenge of leather. Unrolled, it becomes a tongue of leather cut to the shape of her fingers; within it is the tight coil of her bowstring. Dry.

She unravels the cord and ties it to the bowstave then slips the leather tab over her wrist and fastens its flanges to her fingers. She flexes her knuckles. The twisted rope of cloth is unknotted from her waist and draped over her shoulders. The sun will dry it. Aura barks again. The dog has scented her and approaches now at an easy trot, keeping close to the line of the reeds. Atalanta undoes her pouch and upends it: twelve arrowheads, a bone needle, strips of leather, a pair of bronze ankle guards, a knife. She checks each in turn then repacks them. Around her, the rest of the hunters are absorbed in similar business: unstrapping and cleaning weapons, scraping mud, knotting or unknotting scraps of cloth and leather, fitting blades to shafts. These are well-rehearsed preparations.

A little way down the shore, Ancaeus holds out his double-headed axe⁷¹ between two of the sons of Hippocoon, who sharpen their spearheads⁷² against it. The metallic rasp rings out in a complicated rhythm. Her dog has picked up a different scent. The land slopes up from the shoreline in gentle ridges of powdery yellow soil tufted with scrubby grasses.⁷³ Atalanta watches the line of hackles on the animal's back twist as it climbs the incline and disappears from sight. She frowns, puzzled. One of the spear-sharpeners pauses. Further down the beach a head rises from its task. Meilanion? Too distant. The moment stretches and then is snapped by a volley of sharp yelps.

She snatches the knife and is running before she knows it, taking the ground in long strides. She has outrun stags but this is not her terrain. Cold forests and uplands, freezing streams: Arcadia. She reaches the top of the ridge.

Dogs are snarling and scuffling for position. A pack of them surround her animal: Molossians and Castorians⁷⁴ heavy-bodied brown-and-white brutes. She lunges to get an arm around Aura's belly and feels claws scrape down her forearm. She lifts her dog clear. Jaws snap at her forearm and close on air. She knocks the aggressor to the ground. Then, faint yet distinct through the tumult of yelping and barking, she hears the scrape of metal behind her. A sword being unsheathed.

There is no time to think. To hunt is to guess weights, dimensions, angles. The man is behind her and to her left. She must catch him high up, divide him between ducking his head and protecting his face. Cut his throat. Hang his head in a tree. Take his genitals for trophies. She turns on the ball of her heel, planting her other foot forward and raising her arm. She has not touched a man before today, or been touched herself.

But the man stands with the sun behind him, a black shape against the brightness of the sky. His sword is drawn. Atalanta checks her movement. She can smell him. Was this how she smelled to Rhoecus and Hylaeus?⁷⁵ A crested helmet covers his face to the chin, leather body armour sheathes his limbs. She signals her dog to be still. She is unarmed save for her hook-bladed knife, too small to be of use. Her chance has disappeared. She sees the sword stiffen in his grip as though the hand holding it were bronze too, and the arm, the shoulders, a whole body concentrated in the blade. The man stands a full head taller than her, taller than any of the men on the shore, save perhaps the brutish Idas⁷⁶ No part of him moves except his eyes, which move over her. She waits for his advance.

But instead of approaching he calls off the dogs, one by one and by name.⁷⁷ The animal she knocked to the ground rises last and slinks back to join the pack. The man's shadow almost covers her. Her thread of life continues in its lee, binding her to a confusing tangle of fates, but none of them this one. He shifts balance in a delicate movement which sends his shadow forward as though it were a liquid dousing her and soaking her body, an obscure incursion, or insult. To step back, she thinks, means retreat. But...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for In the Shape of a Boar
• Half Title
• Also by Lawrence Norfolk
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I The Hunt for the Boar of Kalydon
• Part II Paris
• Part III Agrapha
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements