The Last Song of Penelope: A powerfully tense and moving conclusion

The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North

Amongst the slew of modern myth retellings the last few years (so many the NY Times recently wrote an article on the number “flooding bookstores”), one of the strongest has been THE SONGS OF PENELOPE by Claire North. The first two, Ithaca and House of Odysseus, were excellent, and North maintains that high standard with the just-released The Last Song of Penelope (2024), which brings the story to a powerfully tense and moving conclusion.

As one might expect from both the series and novel titles, the trilogy focuses on Penelope, the wife of Odysseus and symbol of womanly patience and loyalty, sitting in the palace on Ithaca for 20 years and cleverly holding off the suitors until her famous husband’s return. Or that’s how the male poets would have it. North, though, offers up the “truth” of the matter, giving us a Penelope who takes on the responsibility of leading/protecting her people while heroic Odysseus is off learning new sexual positions from the nymph Calypso. In the first two novels, Penelope uses her wits and a small militia of deadly women to fend off not just the suitors, but also pirates and the greedy eyes of Menelaus who would love to add Ithaca to his collection of Greek isles. She also had to deal with the politics of an absent king, suitors from powerful kingdoms, the mess that was the House of Atreus, and problematic visits from the other two great queens of Greece: Clytemnestra and Electra. The House of Odysseus (spoiler alert for the millennia-old tale) closes with Odysseus himself arriving on shore, raising both the specter of his soon-to-be-had vengeance on the suitors (which those aware of the tale know will be bloody and not particularly selective) and also the question of how Penelope’s position will change.

Those first two books were narrated by Hera and Aphrodite respectfully, while this most recent one shifts to Athena’s point of view. The choice makes sense in that in the original story, Athena is Odysseus’ most prominent protector/advocate, but it also makes sense in that she is the goddess of both war and wisdom, the first of which will embroil Ithaca in violence while the second is the only way to contain and then halt the violence. North also uses Athena to add a meta element to the novel, as the goddess is consciously crafting a story here, one with purpose driven by necessity. For she foresees:

a time when the names of the gods … are diminished, turned from thunder-breakers, ocean-ragers, into little more than jokes and children’s rhymes … I see us withering, falling away … Thus do gods perish … I will not have it … when all else fails I still have one more string to my bow — I will have a story. A good story can outlast almost anything. And for that I need Odysseus.

Athena, therefore, is a writer, attuned to all those elements writers must be aware of, such as the “important emotional part of the overall structure of thing.” What is not included in that list of elements is the truth: “The poets will not sing the truth of Odysseus … The truth does not serve me, it is not wise that it be known.” Here though, in this singular story, Athena will share the truth of Penelope and Odysseus’ story, “the only time I will tell it … the story of what actually happened when Odysseus returned to Ithaca.”

Athena’s narrative voice is closer to Hera’s in book one than Aphrodite’s in book two, sharp in its social critiques of patriarchy, slavery, class; fierce in its feminist stance as she discusses for instance the different portrayal of tears when they fall from the eyes of women versus men or bemoans the loss of an earlier time “when men cowered before the name of Hera, mother-goddess.” She has seen how her fellow female goddesses have been debased by not just mortals but the male Olympians as well, giving us a lengthy run-down of all the ways the several once-powerful women of Olympus were brought low:

Hera, who was once mother-earth, mother-fire. Her brother Zeus raped her, after he had grown bored of all her sisters, and made her his wife … the gods had begun to shape the world to say the woman who is violated may not seek punishment against her attacker but should herself seek to be redeemed … Thus did Hera’s power wane … Endure, endure, endure became the mantra … We cannot punish our men, so we must take our punishment where we can. We punish the whores they fucked, the children they made, the daughters they raped. Cling to what few shreds of power you have… and endure. What else is there to do? Thus fell the first of us.

As for Aphrodite, “if they desired her that meant she had power over them. To diminish her strength, they belittled her, mocked her greatness, called her whore, slut, tits-and-no-brain.” None of the female gods are immune from this treatment, as Athena further details the degradation of Demeter, Métis, and Artemis.

Nor does she avoid turning her gaze inward. She has no illusions regarding her own put-upon-constraints, the ways she too was warped and diminished. Zeus she says was:

fond of me. Fondness was tool by which he could seek to control me while also asserting his dominion over me … “I’m fond of the little darling, isn’t she adorable?” … I was his baby girl — anything except the lady of war, lady of wisdom, the only other divinity to wield the thunder and lightning.

Claire North

When he began to see her as a sexual being, she:

swore myself a virgin … renounced all signs of desire … shuttered my body and my soul … punished women for things men did to them … laughed at the deaths of nameless thousands … In short, I made myself like a man of Olympus.

Like the female Greek gods, Penelope too is threatened by diminishment. After gathering to herself the reins of power and wielding them deftly and effectively for twenty years, Odysseus is back, and her worth and power is immediately negated by his utterly stupid decision to take on the 100 suitors with just his son Telemachus and a half-dozen others, wiping them out in an orgy of murderous violence that undoes all Penelope’s diplomatic work and sparks an all-out attack by the aggrieved fathers of the murders suitors. Worse, he kills several of the maids as well (several only because he is stopped by Penelope’s intervention), thinking them “traitors” for how they moved amongst the suitors. This atrocity is even worse than it seems on the surface, since it was only via the maids’ hidden help — drugging the suitors via the food and locking the doors so they couldn’t escape — that Odysseus was even able to prevail. Basically, the maids saved him from his own stupidity and then were killed for it (The poets, Athena dryly notes, will of course, “speak of a roaring battle … and the rallying of warrior men … a worthy slaughter by Odysseus and his son … This is what I will have said about Odysseus. Perhaps if it is sung enough, one day even I will believe it.)

At first, Odysseus doesn’t even recognize the idiocy of his actions. Just as he cannot at first fathom that his wife did anything of note or acted out of any agency in his absence: “Everyone told him his wife was sitting in her room weeping for him these past twenty years, it was her sole occupation — and though it seemed absurd, in time he’d almost started to believe the tale.” Only when Penelope calls him out on the indefensible position he’s put them in (literally so, as they have to flee the palace and decamp to his father’s house which is more defendable by a small number), and calls him out on the horrific error with the maids, does Odysseus begin to see that perhaps things are not as he thought: politically, in the palace, with his wife, in his views of women, in his concept of manhood. Perhaps, “wise Odysseus” is not as wise as he thinks he is.

North does an absolutely stellar job with all of this. With Penelope standing firm but also recognizing the reality of her situation and Odysseus slowly seeing his own blindness. This doesn’t happen right away. Odysseus is torn between the man he was and the man he could be, something we see in several scenes. And North doesn’t shy away from the violence that first man would employ. Multiple times Odysseus thinks of beating and/or killing Penelope. In one of my favorite such scenes, North brilliantly subverts what we all know about Penelope: her self-effacing patience.

Odysseus thinks of striking her.
Thinks of falling at her feet.
Thinks perhaps that if he stands here long enough, in silence, she will forgive him.
She does not.
Penelope waits.
She is very good at waiting.
So it is Odysseus who turns, walks away.

It is a slow process, as it should be. Nor does it come easily. And it comes not necessarily because he is “wise,” but because he doesn’t like to consider himself “ordinary.” And so, as Athena puts it:

if he is to do these extraordinary things … he may have to make some extraordinary decisions, embrace ideas that no other man would. Ideas that any king or warrior … would dismiss out offhand. Notions such as humility, supplication, maybe even admitting to that most unkingly of attributes: having made a mistake.

To further the idea that this is a cultural issue, a long-standing way of thinking and behaving Odysseus must break through, North gives us a viewpoint from the prior generation as Odysseus’ father Laertes, sent out to parley with the fathers of the slain suitors, realizes he has little he can say to them:

Laertes half closes his eyes … to hear again the crying of young Odysseus, the wailing of the infant Telemachus. As if he could perhaps roll back the years … and whisper, “My beautiful ones, you are safe, you are safe. Let me teach you how to be strong when you are weak, brave when you are afraid.”

Instead he handed the child over to nursemaids … doting “who’s brilliant yes you’re brilliant, a little hero you are’ … Nor was it a father’s place … to show anything other than those qualities of manhood … dignity, composure, strength, honor. The endurance of pain without complaint. Swift violence when slighted. Anger when otherwise tears might flow. These were the qualities passed down father to son, father to son, and now here they stand …

In the end, he simply tells them he will pray for all their sons, as Athena whispers, “let this world burn … Let it be remade.”

Before the close, Odysseus is able to adapt, but it is no happy ending. His awakening will come at great cost to himself:

Odysseus has done terrible things.
He didn’t think they were terrible at the time.
He thought they were what men did.
The things that needed to be done.
He is beginning now to understand.
He fears understanding … the kind of curiosity that might reveal himself to be something he does not want to find himself to be … if the mere whiff of this imagining threatens to break him in two, then just how cruel is the mark his life has left on those who crossed his path?

It’s a powerful moment in a novel and a series full of powerful moments. I’ve honestly barely touched upon all that is so good here. The strength of the main characters: Penelope and Odysseus, yes, but also Laertes; Telemachus; Priene, captain of Penelope’s soldier women; Kenamon, the suitor from Egypt with whom Penelope just might have found a shared happiness with; Polybus, the grieving father of a slain suitor. All drawn vividly, all given their own moving moments. The compelling nature of the plot: first the dread of what we all know must come — the slaying of the suitors and the maids, then the speculative dread of what will happen with Penelope, and then the more pragmatic suspense of a siege at Laertes. It’s a long siege in terms of how much of the book it takes up, but it isn’t not simply a series of skirmishes but a means to develop character and relationships.

In my review of the first two novels, I said that while they hadn’t risen to the incredibly high level of my favorite retellings, such as Madeline Miller’s Circe or Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, they were in my second tier, one just below (excellent versus great). But with The Last Song of Penelope, I’m happy to say North has elevated the entire series to that first tier. I can’t recommend the trilogy enough as far as I’m concerned.