Guest Review: "The Golden Fleece" a.k.a. "Hercules, My Shipmate" by Robert Graves, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves, a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award in the Best Novel category. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Golden Fleece.

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In 1957, the English poet Robert Graves delivered a lecture to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of New York City. He revealed the Road to Damascus moment of his career:

In 1944, at a Devonshire village called Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me...

Well, within three weeks, I had written a 70,000-word book about the ancient Mediterranean Moon-goddess whom Homer invoked in the Iliad, and whom one of his sons, or (as some prefer to think) one of his daughters, invoked in the Odyssey: and to whom most traditional poets ever since have paid at any rate lip-service...

The fact is, while working on my Argonaut book, I found the figure of the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more powerful, until she dominated the story.

The Goddess didn’t just dominate his Argonaut book; She dominated the rest of his life. He soon came to believe that all true poets (such as Robert Graves) serve the lunar, pre-historic Triple Goddess of Imagination, while all false poets (such as everyone in recorded history besides Robert Graves) worship the solar, modern, decadent gods of Reason. From then until the day he died, he proselytized nonstop for the Goddess, revising history, myth, and his own autobiography to suit Her cruel caprices.

Few cared. Of the hundred or so books Graves published during his lifetime, only I, Claudius has consistently stayed in print. His first Goddess book, The Golden Fleece, quirky as it is, would be right at home in today’s publishing landscape, where postmodern hot-takes on the classics seem to be more popular than ever. By now I’ve watched or read so many mashups and retellings of Grimm folk tales and Greek myths that I can’t remember the “straight” versions anymore. In a shared pop culture, there is no One True Canonized Version, and it’s up to you to choose which version is best, embellishing or interpreting it as you see fit.

What versions influenced Graves? Bizarrely, the new Rosetta ebook edition of the The Golden Fleece omits the Historical Appendix, where Graves discusses the numerous difficulties involved in exhuming a coherent storyline from ancient Fleece sources, both Greek and Roman. (You can try reading the Appendix in the 1944 edition here. I’d love to meet the American editor who convinced Graves that retitling the book Hercules, My Shipmate would increase sales.) It turns out that Apollonius, Pindar, Ovid, Herodotus and other authorities disagreed on most details, major and minor, and also frequently contradicted themselves in their own writings.

Which isn’t a problem for me, whose Fleece knowledge derives from one modern source, the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts. It’s awesome. Highlights include a beguiling, toga-clad Honor Blackman as the mischievous Hera, queen of the gods, and a thrilling skirmish between the Argonauts and a vicious gang of sword-wielding skeletons who sprout, full-grown, from a handful of hydra’s teeth. I’ll take Ray Harryhausen over Herodotus any day.

The famous skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts.

I’m sorry to report that Graves doesn’t provide a comparably rousing experience with his Argonaut book. You could fairly describe it as one sprawling infodump. The pedant in him can’t resist constantly interrupting the Fleece story to recount other tangential myths, such as the birth of Aphrodite or the Twelve Labors of Hercules. That wouldn’t matter as much if these potted summaries were imaginatively retold, but except for the White Goddess portions, Graves doesn’t give them any more pizzazz than a Wikipedia entry. As a result the novel loses focus and makes you wish Graves had trimmed about 30 percent of it.

Another disappointment is the dialogue. Part of the fun and audacity of I, Claudius is that the ancient Romans speak like modern Britons, abstaining from the pompous pseudo-Shakespearean dialect that used to mar so many historical novels. In Fleece the characters don’t really converse with each other; they orate in the same bland, stiff, generic style of the novel’s narrative. You can’t tell one character from another by their speech. For that matter, characterization isn't a strong feature of the novel. Things perk up a bit whenever Hercules appears, but Jason himself is a cipher and even the fiery Medea fails to make much of an impression.

The main flaw is simply that the foreground story of Jason's quest all too clearly interests Graves less than the background story of the transition from a Goddess-dominated matriarchy to a God-dominated patriarchy. It’s an odd experience to read a novel in which expository digressions about the White Goddess have far more vitality than the battle scenes or sex scenes.

The biggest letdown is the description of the repopulation of Lemnos, an island whose men have all been murdered by the women - who are consequently feeling awful lonely by the time the Argonauts reach their shores. As Graves complains in the Appendix, prudish Victorians like William Morris ignored the Lemnian women, even though it’s the one episode that all the ancient sources include. Yet Graves doesn’t render the ensuing orgy with any particular bawdiness or relish, only informing us that Hercules alone impregnates 69 women and Jason sires two sons. The nominal climax of the novel - when the Argonauts seize the Golden Fleece - is equally uninspired. Jason and Medea drug the Fleece’s serpent-guardian and place the Fleece in a basket with all the drama and excitement of tossing a damp beach towel into a laundry hamper.

What the novel lacks the most, ironically, is poetry, any sensuous use of language. Graves is one of the few modern poets I enjoy. Even a decadent, sun-worshipping, novel-reading rationalist like me can appreciate the originality and harrowing lyricism of poems like Love Without Hope, Recalling War, and The Pier Glass. In the lesser art of prose, Graves is a master of plain, blunt, lucid English, which perfectly suits his polemical essays but which isn’t necessarily the best style to use for fiction. Graves hated rhetoric and jargon so much he probably went too far in “murdering his darlings”. There’s no Victorian excess in The Golden Fleece but also no especially memorable passages, giving the whole novel a leaden, matter of fact quality that’s hardly exhilarating. But unobtrusive prose was part of his personal creed. Graves wasn’t shy about expressing his disdain for sloppy or fancy writing, and he became notorious for his merciless criticisms of eminent writers.

So I shudder to think how Graves would have reacted to, say, a Conan story like “Red Nails”, which nevertheless has a quality that Graves’ fiction usually lacks: conviction. Though Robert E. Howard mangles English grammar the way Hercules mangled the Nemean lion, his flailing, overwrought prose transports you to an atavistic dream-world where heroes, gods, and magic are an undisputed reality. He recaptures the flavor of Homeric sagas. By contrast Graves is a witty, secular museum guide offering sympathetic interpretations of quaint old customs. Despite his longing to revive the age of myth and metaphor, in The Golden Fleece Graves never comes across as a true believer who has a childish faith in his own creations. That's a fatal weakness for a novelist.

Not that Graves would mind if you told him his fiction was weak - despite the fact that he wrote over 20 novels, he seemed to be dismissive of the form. Like millions of his contemporaries, Graves was addicted to the output of Georges Simenon, but otherwise there’s no evidence that he had the slightest interest in modern fiction. As fiercely independent as he was, it still seems odd that he wouldn’t want to learn a fictional technique or two from the living masters of storytelling. Likewise it’s surprising that Graves never wrote a White Goddess version of Arthurian myth, which is more or less what Marion Zimmer Bradley did with The Mists of Avalon. Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake might have fit the Goddess template more convincingly than Hera and Medea.

I suppose your response to The Golden Fleece depends on how much you care about the arc of Robert Graves’ career. If you’re already a Graves fan, Fleece is an important stepping-stone in his development. On its own terms, Fleece is a perfunctory retelling of what should have been a stirring fantasy adventure. It has nowhere near the emotional impact of Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius, so I wouldn’t award it a Retro Hugo, but for the most part I didn’t mind accompanying Graves here at the beginning of his lifelong devotion to the Goddess.

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Many thanks to Don Briago for this great review of The Golden Fleece, even if the novel itself turned out to be a bit dull.