Cassie McCullagh

Before we get to this latest iteration, Tom Wright, why do you think this 10-year-long war still has such resonance?

And that's where I actually thought that Pat Barker's version of the women's story was interesting.

But there's so many things you can then do with these named heroes and the people who are ostensibly the hero of the stories if you decide to play around with it.

And that's what Jan Martell has done in this latest novel of his, Son of Nobody.

Now, just to remind people, Jan Martel is the Canadian writer whose books include Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Man Booker Prize.

He's also written Beatrice and Virgil, Self and the High Mountains of Portugal.

So he's somebody who also, I think, is very interested in fables and myths themselves.

and fiction that's not necessarily realist.

But what he's done with this one, Son of Nobody, is he's taken the idea of the Trojan War story and what he's done on the page is something that mirrors what a lot of classical texts do.

So if you read something like the Loeb edition of the Iliad or whatever, you have the epic poem in the top half of the page

You have a line in the middle of the page and underneath you have very long and very detailed explanatory texts that become almost like a conversation between the top and the bottom of the page.

And that's how he has set up this novel.

At the top of the page, you have a new version of the Trojan War.

And it's a new epic poem that supposedly has been found within the Oxyrhynchus papyrus.

So I'm just going to pause there for a second and explain that this epic poem has been written and translated by another character who we meet on the page, which is a Canadian scholar, a PhD student.

His name is Harlow Don.

He's a classicist.

He lives with his wife, Gail, and he's mostly, as a PhD student, he's mostly the at-home carer for their daughter, whose name is Helen.

She's about eight.

And then he gets a one-year scholarship to head to Oxford to go to the Ashmolean Library and to do –