The title The Penelopiad suggests spoof. I blamed the marketing department at Knopf Canada. The slaughter of the maids and mutilation of Melanthius is the brutal conclusion to a story I have been reading on and off for twenty years. After the block of the title, I expected much from Atwood: a feminist reading of Penelope’s story.

I found Atwood’s story wanting, compared to her other books. The humour lacked subtlety. Describing the race Odysseus won to secure Penelope as his wife, Atwood writes:

“He cheated. […] He mixed the wine of the other contestants with a drug that slowed them down, though not so much as they would notice; to Odysseus he gave a potion that had the opposite effect. I understand that this sort of thing has become a tradition, and is still practised in the world of the living when it comes to athletic contests.”

This from the Margaret Atwood who wrote in The Handmaid’s Tale: “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping.”

‘The Anthropology Lecture’ and ‘The Trial of Odysseus as Videotaped by the Maids’ chapters suggest similar tonal missteps.

Yet it was an opportunity to hear retold a part of The Odyssey from a different perspective. And it had the virtue of brevity.