![]() (Haynes has no truck with those who reach for the tragedy’s Latin name: “I can’t stop you from calling it Oedipus Rex, obviously,” she sighs, “but since he isn’t Roman or a dinosaur, I can’t bring myself to do it.”) Sophocles anatomises Oedipus’s mounting horror as realisation dawns that by doing everything in his power to thwart the prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, he has inadvertently fulfilled it. In Oedipus Tyrannos, it is the doomed, anguished king who stands in the limelight. ![]() ![]() Haynes’s aim, as she explains in a lengthy afterword, is to rescue two of the plays’ minor characters from unjust obscurity. ![]() The Children of Jocasta, which joins a slew of classical retellings this year from Colm Tóibín, Kamila Shamsie, David Vann and others, takes the story of Oedipus as it unfolds in Sophocles’ trio of Theban plays, and attempts to recast it for the 21st century. ![]() N atalie Haynes has found success in the fields of journalism, broadcasting, children’s fiction and comedy – but she is a classicist by training, and it’s to her first love that she returns in her second novel. ![]()
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