Up until a month ago, I was familiar the overall outline of the Odyssey (and had read Joyce's Ulysses) but had never read the original. Now of course I still haven't read the original Greek, but I've read a couple of solid translations and thus it seemed like a good time to read Atwood's take on Homer.
Atwood focuses generally on the fact that Penelope doesn't do a whole lot in the Odyssey other than fall down on her bed a lot and cry, though she does assist in accelerating Odysseus's plan to rid his palace of the suitors by forging ahead with an archery contest (giving herself up as the first prize). Incidentally, Atwood is hardly the first scholar to suggest that Penelope easily saw through the disguise,* as it would hardly have made sense to give up on waiting for his safe return right after she had just received the most concrete news that he had not died after all. But Atwood focuses quite intently on the fact that Odysseus decided that quite a few of the palace maids were "bad apples," so he had his old nurse point out the worst, and she fingered twelve maids who were loose (having taken some of the suitors as lovers) and talked back. Melantho, the only maid named in the Odyssey, was particularly saucy and had no reverence even for Telemachus. Odyssey says they must all be killed (after they are forced to clean up the enormous, gory mess after the battle with the suitors) and delegates this task to Telemachus. Telemachus ends up hanging all 12 of the maids.
Atwood is really going for two things here. First, she wants to give voice to Penelope, though Penelope mostly tries to justify her general lack of agency (in the Odyssey) by saying that her mother had been a naiad (a water spirit) and had modelled the art of flowing around obstacles and not putting up too much open resistance. Second, she wants to make the case that the maids were actually acting on Penelope's behalf, getting close to the suitors and finding out things about them that Penelope could then use to play them off each other. If a few of them, such as Melantho, fell in love with the role** (and perhaps her suitor as well), that was a risk that Penelope had to run. Given that Penelope was locked away during the slaughter of the suitors (and hadn't been able to fully confide in Odysseus in his beggar garb), her biggest regret is that she didn't tell the nurse, Eurycleia, who might then have interceded to spare the maids. Nonetheless, Penelope still justifies her own actions in saying that she thought Eurycleia was a fairly big blabber-mouth who might have let the cat out of the bag too soon, i.e. at any point over the previous 10 years prior to Odysseus's return.
I should probably mention that all of this is being related as if Penelope is one of the spirits of the dead (just like the ones that Odysseus conjures up in Book XI) and Helen is also around, still tormenting her in various subtle ways. The maids are there as well. Odysseus puts in an appearance now and again, but he gets very upset by the maids, who seem to hold him the greatest blame, though they aren't too pleased with Penelope either. (Unless I totally missed it, Telemachus is just talked about but never really appears in the land of the dead.) While Penelope pleads with the maids to forgive her husband, since it was at least partly her own fault, they haunt him, dancing with their feet just off the ground, driving him slightly mad, so that he drinks of the river Lethe and gets reincarnated, leaving her again and again. (I'm almost certain that Atwood is drawing on Virgil here and not Homer.)
There are quite a few sly asides scattered throughout the book, particularly when Penelope and Helen meet up. She also points out that she doesn't know when or why the shroud that she delayed finishing up became known as Penelope's web (as if she were a spider), which doesn't please her. Basically, she isn't all that happy with her lot, but she also doesn't think that drinking from the river Lethe will necessarily lead to any more happiness (particularly as Atwood posits that after dying for a second or third time, the dead remember their past lives).
One of the more intriguing aspects of this novel is that it was actually turned into a stage play in 2007. I've actually seen it twice - first in Vancouver and then when George Brown put it on in Toronto in 2017. I passed on seeing Hart House do it, and apparently a theatre in London, Ont. just put it on recently. It's got pretty good legs for a relatively recent play, though of course it is by Atwood and has many, many roles for women (in fact, it is normally staged with an all-female crew, with the actors doubling as the maids and then all the other roles, male or female). While I like Enda Walsh's Penelope quite a bit, the focus is on the verbal pyrotechnics of four remaining suitors and Penelope is basically just a silent beacon to them. If anything she has even less agency (and voice) than she does in the Odyssey itself. That said, it doesn't appear Walsh's Penelope has ever played Toronto, and I do hope it does one of these days.
It does seem fitting that the cover of the play version of the Penelopiad focuses on the maids, which is the inevitable outcome when the focus is split away from Penelope to the suffering of the maids. It's not that they don't sing their songs of outrage in the novel, but there is a big difference between reading the words on the page and having 10 or 11 or 12 actors say them in unison!
After comparing the two editions, I would say that Atwood (and the theatre types that helped her whip this into shape) have done an excellent job in distilling the main points. You still have Penelope's discussion of her troubled childhood and her verbal sparring with Helen. There are plenty of sly asides. But the material is considerably tighter. While it is a shame that a couple of amusing stanzas of The Wily Sea Captain song are cut (it goes from 15 stanzas to 7), it is quite possible that the entire song would have just been a bit too much. That said, it is a particularly clever piece of writing in the original novel (it's section xiii), managing to squeeze in almost all of the key elements of the Odyssey, even his being rescued by Nausica and her maids on "laundry day." In the play, the second to last stanza really ought to end in "dodger" or "garage-er" or something. Instead it ends "'Tis she that does send his heart soaring!," which is a fine sentiment but doesn't rhyme with anything else in the song.
There are two sections of the novel that are dropped completely. One is a fabricated anthropology lecture on the significance of the number 12 in the original legend (section xxiv), while the other (section xxvi) is a People's Court trial where Odysseus is going to try to get relief from the plaintiffs (the Maids). While these are both interesting, they do stand out quite a bit from the rest of the novel and are post-modern trappings (which some people enjoy and others loathe). These two sections can fairly safely be excised for a tighter overall narrative. All things considered, the play version may be the best way to experience Atwood's Penelopiad, particularly if you can actually see it in performance.
* Athena had transformed Odysseus into the guise of an old beggar, going so far as to make most of his hair fall out.
** This is a deliberate echo of Jon Sinclair's poem on Thelonious Monk where Monk is accused of falling love with the act (of feigning madness).
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