If you liked Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ...
...here are two more classic tales re-told...
The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur by Victor Pelevin
Reviewed by Time magazine as ‘a psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber age’, Pelevin updates the tale of Theseus and the minotaur to the very twenty-first century setting of an internet chatroom. In the Greek myth, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos of Crete, falls in love with Theseus and helps him kill the fearsome Minotaur, a half-bull, half-human monster trapped in the centre of a vast labyrinth. Armed with the sword that she supplies and holding the end of a thread that marks his path, Theseus kills the beast and makes his way back out. Here, Pelevin creates a brilliant new telling of the myth: a group of strangers find themselves in a modern-day labyrinth, trapped in identical rooms, given archetypal screen names and able to interact only through a chatroom thread begun by one ‘Ariadne’. The figures who inhabit this doomed maze are drawn from many sources, for instance, ‘Romeo-y-Cohiba’ and ‘IsoldA’ both look for love, but are stymied when they try to find it with each other. All are haunted by the ‘Helmet of Horror’, which is both the machine that controls their destiny and the mind that creates the machine, and there is no Theseus to save them...
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood tackles another Greek myth in granting Odysseus’ wife Penelope an opportunity to tell her account of ‘the odyssey’. As portrayed in Homer's 'Odyssey', Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, ruthlessly hangs Penelope's twelve maids.
