‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the casus belli, the other the most infamous agent of the aftermath. Another Irish writer now takes up the story, without the magnificent cloak of myth. House of Names is a portrait of a brutal, disenchanted world of political tyranny, slaughter and revenge.
In the first section, ‘Clytemnestra’, Agamemnon’s queen is an imposing but still sympathetic figure as she joyously accompanies her daughter Iphigenia to Aulis to betroth her, she thinks, to the warrior Achilles. Eager to get to Troy, Achilles is either not bright enough or too careless to keep up the deception, and the queen is forced to hand the girl over to be sacrificed for a fair wind.
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