Demigods and Monsters (21 page)

Now I said to my mother, “I think it was like Medusa.” Medusa, the most terrible of the monstrous Gorgon sisters, with her snake hair and her cold, cold glance that would turn you to stone on the spot if you looked into her face. “But she was real, in my dream.”

“Of course,” said my mother. “She was real to Perseus too. What did he do to defeat her?”

“He used the shield Athena gave him like a mirror, so he wouldn't look into her eyes and be turned to stone. Then he cut off her head,” I said promptly.

“Then,” said my mother, smiling, “you know what to do. Don't be afraid. Just think about lifting up your shield and swinging your sword, and it won't be able to hurt you anymore.”

Am I supposed to dream that?
I thought, puzzled.
Am I meant to try and make myself dream about defeating Medusa? I don't think I can do that. I've tried to stop myself dreaming about that Medusa face, and I can't. I've tried to make myself have nice dreams every night, and I can't.
But if I said I couldn't do it, perhaps my mother would take away my beloved
Tales of the Greek Heroes
because it was too frightening for me, giving me nightmares. I didn't want that to happen. So I said, “Okay,” as if I knew what to do.

That night I lay in bed worrying about it. I tried to will the picture into my head, of me holding up a shield as a mirror toward that horrible face so that I would dream about it when I fell asleep. But it felt silly. I wasn't Perseus. I didn't have a shield. Or a cap of invisibility
or magic shoes, much as I wanted them. What would you use, if you weren't an Ancient Greek hero and a horrible face haunted your dreaming self and turned it to stone, unable to move or run away? Then I thought,
Of course! You'd just use an ordinary mirror.
Not the big one in the bathroom that you couldn't get off the wall, but a little one, like the one my mother had on her dressing table. I imagined myself picking up that mirror and holding it up in front of me. It didn't seem like much of a weapon against a monster, but it would have to do. And what would happen next? Perseus had chopped off the Gorgon's head with the strongest weapon in the world, the adamantine sickle the god Hermes had given him. I didn't have anything remotely like that. My little brother had a toy sword, but a very small one, made of plastic. Not the kind of thing you'd want to use against an ancient monster. Not at all the sort you . . .

Worrying about it, I fell asleep. I didn't even know I had, until the next morning when I woke up. The face hadn't appeared in my dreams. It wasn't because I'd forgotten what I dreamt. I never forgot it if the face appeared. But it hadn't come. I hadn't had to fight it, with or without the hand mirror and the toy sword. It just hadn't come.

It didn't come the next night, or the next, or the next. In fact, it never came back. Not once. I never forgot that dream, but I never had it again. I had other bad dreams from time to time and lots of good ones. (I still have lots and lots of very vivid dreams, some of which have gone into my books and inspired some of my stories.) I kept reading
Tales of the Greek Heroes
and every time I had a little shiver over the Medusa story. It was a kind of mixed shiver: fear mixed with pleasure. Pleasure because I thought I'd done what Perseus had, I'd defeated the monster. I did not have to literally fight it, with actual weapons. But I know that it isn't coincidence it went away when my mother's questions helped me to
recognize
the monster and think what I could do to fight it. And because of that, the dream-monster lost the power to frighten me. It vanished, never to return.

But the memory of that dream still lived at the back of my mind. Many years later, when I'd become a writer myself, I watched a really creepy old movie called
The Medusa Touch
(starring Richard Burton) about a guy who had Gorgon eyes—he could stop people's hearts and make planes fall out of the sky like stones. And I remembered my Medusa dream. Though she'd never come back in a dream, I could still see that face so clearly. I'd grown up by then, and life had taught me that there were all kinds of monsters in the world, not just dream ones or ones in stories. I knew that some of them were not terrifying at first sight like Medusa but might wear normal or even friendly faces. I had come to understand that monsters lived in the human heart and sometimes caused people to do the most dreadful and horrific things, things that would turn you to stone if you thought about them for too long. Monsters might also be pitiable, like Medusa, turned to a ravening, hate-filled, vengeful monster by the gods because she dared to love who she must not love. The word we often use in our society for a monstrous personality is “psychopath,” a word that comes from two Greek words:
psyche
, meaning the soul, and
pathos
, meaning suffering, or sickness. So “psychopath” literally means “soul-sick,” as good a description of a monster like Medusa as any other.

I had come to realize that the amazing world of fairy tales and legends and myths, where gods, heroes, monsters, fairies, and witches share an enchanted and scary space, isn't just about adventure and magic. It isn't even just about monsters and defeating them. It has a lot to tell us about the world of flesh and blood and suffering and glory in which we live, and about our inner selves as human beings. These stories speak in the language of the human heart: a language of courage and terror, joy and pain. A language that is still intensely relevant. The old stories tell us about ourselves—what we are capable of, what we might do. We might not know exactly what it is like to be an ancient hero defeating a superhuman monster, but we all know what it's like to be afraid of evil and danger. And we
hope that, faced with a challenge, we too will take our courage in both hands and go out to do what must be done. We might not exactly be princesses shut up in towers by tyrannical fathers, like Perseus' mother Danae was. But we all know young people who are in similar sorts of situations in the everyday world. The old stories open us up to possibilities all around us.

Myself, I write fantasy, that inheritor of myth and fairy tale, because I feel it also speaks with the language of the heart. It possesses the realism of the soul, a heightened sort of realism where a hero can defeat a fearsome monster with his or her wits and courage, not just a mirror and a sword, and can learn all kinds of things about himself or herself while doing so.

I'd never forgotten
Tales of the Greek Heroes
. I'd often wondered why no one, including myself, ever used the Greek myths as background for fantasy novels. We used Celtic myths—a lot—Norse myths, Arthurian myths, and others, occasionally, including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. But not Greek myths. And yet Greek myth is at the foundation of so many of our stories in Western Civilization.

I thought about it for a time. If I was going to write something based on Greek myth, I thought, I'd pick the story of Perseus. It had the right elements to make it really interesting. Perseus wasn't a guy of extraordinary strength, like Hercules. He didn't go seeking riches, like Jason, and betray the woman who had helped him. Besides, he was the one who had defeated Medusa, so I always felt close to him, because of that dream. And as well as Hermes' sickle and Athena's shield, he had those cool magic gifts from the nymphs: the Shoes of Swiftness and the Cap of Darkness, which made him invisible. You could write a really great updated version of his adventures, I thought. I'd get around to it maybe, one day, I mused vaguely. Very vaguely. There was always another book to write, another story that clamored to be written down first.

So imagine the mixture of delight and dismay when I first picked up Rick Riordan's
The Lightning Thief
! But sweet delight very quickly won over sour old dismay. After a very short cross writer's moment in which I thought,
Blast, this guy's pipped me to the post about an updated Perseus
, I got thoroughly immersed in the story and the way in which the writer had been able to stay true to a good deal of the savage power and magic of the Greek original whilst also being able to totally bring the story into the twenty-first century. Riordan makes us really believe in Percy and his fellow half-bloods, troubled offspring of gods and humans, a world where Olympus is on the 600
^th
floor of the Empire State Building; war god Ares is a red-eyed biker; the Delphic Oracle is a mummified Woodstock hippie; the three Fates knit the socks of Death; a Hitlerian Hades is defended by a (literal) skeleton army; and the Mother of Monsters, Echidna, chucks a hissy fit (most amusing to us Australian readers) about the “ridiculous animal” that bears her name in the Antipodes. A world in which a burger-cooking, seemingly sweet, veiled old lady with a warehouse full of fearful-faced stone statues is the dread Medusa. Dread, and deadly dangerous, but also pitiable. . . .

What wonderful invention! What fun! What a glorious mixture of humor and adventure and gruesomeness and tragedy we rollick through in these pages as Percy and Annabeth and all their friends battle it out with scores of monstrous enemies in order to try and forestall a war between gods that would shake the world to its core! Reading it, I felt plunged back into the world of my younger self, into a landscape where everything was possible, where gods and monsters lived in all kinds of guises and might not only pop up in your dreams but in your life too. But I also read it very much as an adult, as writer as well as reader, and was enormously impressed. For the series is more than just a very skillful, clever, imaginative use of the Greek myths in a wonderful fantasy adventure for kids. It delves into characters' motivations, into their backstories, their troubles and traumas—especially Percy's, as he tries to be brave and
make sense of a world that has suddenly become bewildering and dangerous. It also successfully transposes the setting for the gods, heroes, and monsters. As the wheelchair-bound centaur tutor Chiron tells Percy, in chapter five of
The Lightning Thief
:

He tells Percy that this living force started in Greece and went on to Rome, Germany, Spain, France, England—wherever the flame of Western Civilization was strongest, there were the gods. And now they are in Percy's own country, the United States: “Like it or not—and believe me, people weren't very fond of Rome, either—America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here. And we are here.”

A year or two before I read
The Lightning Thief
, I read Neil Gaiman's extraordinary (adult) novel,
American Gods
, in which Gaiman imagines a United States in which all the gods brought over with the diverse multitudes of immigrants are struggling to keep their niches and make a home in a place which has half-forgotten them. They scratch out livings in corners and run various scams and get involved in all sorts of things, especially the trickster gods like the Norse god Loki and the West African god Anansi. It's an amazing and vivid and detailed picture of a weird and yet totally believable world, and in many ways reading Percy Jackson reminded me of reading it. The Percy Jackson series is aimed at kids rather than adults, but it is just as strong and interesting and unusual, and does not underestimate its readership. And it is just as focused on the
concept that it is America that is the new home of the gods, America where important, world-changing battles are fought.

For the non-American reader, that can be a bit of a challenge—and yet Riordan carries it off with such
élan
and pizzazz that you can't be offended. You really enter into the whole idea. You feel as though he has completely, and successfully, re-imagined modern America as the new home of myth, where just about anything can happen. In
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, by William Shakespeare, one of the characters (incidentally named after one of the Greek heroes, Theseus) talks of “airy nothings”—the enchanted world of myths and legends and fairy tales—being “given a local habitation and a name.” And that's what Riordan has done, with his daring re-imagining of the myth in an American setting: He has given them a new “local habitation and a name.” And it works. In fact, it works very well.

But of course, if Percy's country is the new home of the gods, then it follows it's also the new haunt of the monsters. And like the gods, they've come back in forms different from how they presented themselves in the original myths. They, too, have moved with the times. They come at Percy from all angles, and he has to learn to fight them, as well as try to accept he's actually a demigod. And through his fights with the monsters, as well as his confrontation with Hades, he also learns another important thing: that death may not be the ultimate enemy. No, the thing that crouches in the pit, waiting to rise again—the ironically timeless evil that is the Titan Kronos, devouring old Father Time himself—is the ultimate enemy. And he's the scariest and most powerful monster of them all, for he devours everything.