Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins, with drawings by Chris Ofili (Pantheon, 336 pages)

By Celia McGee

At first, we’re the Greek myths we grew up with.

For Charlotte Higgins, now chief cultural critic for The Guardian, this meant curling up on the floor of her family’s English Midlands home in the 1970s with the standard issue classics of the past however many centuries, which leaned heavily not on the role of women in the telling of those tales. Greek Myths: A New Retelling is Higgins’s splendid re-balancing act. Reimagining antiquity’s legends by centering them on women as both chroniclers and chronicled, she places her distaff halves where they literally had the most to say: at their looms. The weaving of textiles not only depicted the stories but furnished the text-textiles metaphor for storytelling itself, handing her a compelling case.

A student of antiquity so assiduous she learned the age-old craft, Higgins also writes with verve and pop, pulling no punches when it comes to Herculean—let’s make that Helenian—gore and violence, incest and intrigue, rapaciousness and rape. Passions are peculiar in the extreme. Her Athena would have been right at home at Guantanamo, her Philomela wins the tragedy sweepstakes and international singing contest, and her Three Fates are notable for unspooling our very lives. The material, deeply rich, doesn’t start with Penelope, it saves her for a last sensational wallop that shows how skillfully Higgins has populated her pages with villainesses, heroines and the women in between. To get there, it works its way up and down a family tree rooted equally in the daily and the divine—mixed ancestry was often the result--its branches, thorny and complex, stretching lore from Algeria to Afghanistan, from Sudan and Syria to Italy and Spain.

Once upon a time in the school systems of Manchester and Lagos, the boy who would grow up to become the artist Chris Ofili also came in contact with the Greek myths. The drawings he has made for Higgins’s book—emphatically not illustrations—are delicate yet powerful. Inside the book, they look diaphanous enough to have been traced in stardust or the gossamer of Arachne's future kin. On the cover, lines as white as Iphigeneia’s sacrificial clothing dance against a cerulean blue background. It’s a worthwhile partnership of author and artist.

Celia McGee is the literary editor of Avenue magazine.