The Bloody Branch by Brigid Lowe review: 'moments of glee'

I read an article recently bemoaning the “fad” for retelling stories from classical sources, calling it “thoroughly exhausted”. There is some justification if one looks at the successes of Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker and Madeline Miller, or even Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy or Jeanette Winterson’s Weight. I’d make a case for Marie Philips, whose Gods Behaving Badly is a smart comic reframing (and superior, in my mind, to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods), for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a more avant-garde and piercing work, and for Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. Lennon is the first male author mentioned in this overview, and in the article I read the writer insisted they were not per se against “feminist” reinterpretations, just that gosh-a-me there were an awfae lot.

Brigid Lowe | Contributed

There may be a lot, some may even think it a superfluity, but it is also the case that it has ever been thus. It is not exactly Benjamin Jowett’s contention that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, but it is the case that Joyce rewrote Homer, that Racine rewrote Euripides, that Shakespeare rewrote Ovid. Inspiration is also excavation. The history of writing is the history of rewriting.

That re-imaginings so rarely stray from the classics (or Europe) is regrettable. Perhaps only the Gospels have been more frequently retold, and certainly they have been twisted and mangled and overwritten in a cacophony of ways. Even recent works are not immune, such as Percival Everett’s James riffing on Huckleberry Finn, or Sandra Newman’s Julia counterpoising 1984, or Xiaolu Guo’s Call me Ishmaelle (I won’t patronise our readers by explaining which novel it is remaking). But I do worry that the wells of inspiration are, if not running dry, certainly not as wet as once they were. Tell me the old, old story – but in a different key.

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There is a world elsewhere, as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus says. I was therefore intrigued by this new novel, since it is inspired by tales from the 12th century Welsh text, The Mabinogion. The Mabinogion is not as well known; and most of the translations I have are archaic, evasive, foosty and high-falutin’. (Readers who are interested to learn more should seek out the version translated by Sioned Davies, from 2018). Encountering The Mabinogion if you – as I was – were brought up on Graeco-Roman myths with a sprinkling of the Norse Eddas and a bit of Beowulf is disconcerting. These texts are more fragmentary and inchoate and unsettling. This is not in this retelling, but The Mabinogion has a story about how Manawdyan breaks a spell by threatening to execute a fat pregnant mouse that ravages his crops, despite the imprecations of a cleric, a priest and a bishop, and so reveals the mouse was actually the wife of the wizard Llwyd ap Cil Coed who had cursed him. The reason to read The Mabinogion is its utter unlikeness to conventional heroic narrative we have.

Lowe takes three characters – Goewin, who has to tend the feet of the magic-wielding king Math because of his accursedness; the sorceress Arianrhod, estranged and tricked by her family; and the woman created out of flowers, Bloduewedd, in the original a mere mannequin, confected by the enchanter Gwydion (Arianrhod’s brother, adopted son to Math and who intended Bloduewedd for his equally strangely-made son Lleu Llaw Gyffes) – and reframes this as Charlie’s Angels. Three strong women are united to bring down the scheming, nefarious, untrustworthy and incest-adjacent incel cleverclogs. The book is prefaced with a trigger warning – you have been warned – and does feature one character being raped by a pig (much more Hope Hodgson’s The Pig or House on the Borderland than Celtic Twilight).

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But when it is attempting the erotic, it really should have a parental advisory. Take this, from Blodeuwedd’s perspective: “And soon, as I hoped, he longed for me to bend to him, like a sunflower towards the light; longed for me to cling to him, like a briony about the bough; longed for me to open for him; as a full bloom opens for the bee”. There is gilding the lily and then there’s emptying a can of Dulux over your own head. Moreover, we got the point at the outset: she’s made of flowers. It’s “Fifty Shades of Glas”.

In the opening chapters, we have Goewin in conversation with an unnamed guest, who accompanied her when Arionrhod summons her to open a can of whup-ass on Gwydion. The character does appear, fleetingly, at the end. I thought there would be a reveal: who is the stranger? Generously, I’d say “the reader”; critically, I’d say “convenient device for backstory drop”. There are moments of glee – I liked the battle scene with the fighting trees, but then on reading more closely and looking, for the first time in a long time, at the poem “Cad Goddeu”, I thought: but wasn’t the original like the pseudo-Homeric “Battle of Mice and Frogs”? It’s burlesque and satire, not Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings style over-the-toppery.

Of course, the “rewrite a classic” and its tributary “witches was cool” meet, with an eco-twist. The moral shoe-horning is at a serious level a grave disrespect to the dead: the ones who cannot answer back.

The Bloody Branch, by Brigid Lowe, Harvill, £16.99

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