The month of November is a natural time to turn one’s thoughts to death. The seasons are changing, leaves are flaming in brilliant color before dropping to the ground; summer fruits and vegetables become scarce on grocery shelves; the air itself grows colder and foretells the coming of winter.
It’s no surprise, then, that during this month the church invites us to pray for the dead and ponder what’s popularly known as The Four Last Things: death, judgment and either eternal union with God in heaven or eternal separation from him in hell.
Hell features in Benedictine Father J. Augustine Wetta’s novel, “The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld” (Ignatius, $21.95). Picking up where Dante’s “Inferno” left him, the famed thief of mythic Greece in a bolt of inspiration calls upon his patroness, Athena, whom he refers to as the “Parthenos” (“Virgin”). A virgin certainly does appear and offers Odysseus and his fellow-sufferer Diomedes a chance at liberation: if the pair can descend through the nine layers of hell and learn how the underworld is the “geography of their own souls,” they may just be able to escape their prison.
To aid them in this daunting task, the Parthenos gives Odysseus and Diomedes their weapons and armor, including Odysseus’ famous bow, an ostensibly ordinary sack of unleavened bread and a quiver of seven arrows. (The careful reader will note the difference between that total and the title of the novel). She also gives them some parting advice: “Prefer your wit to your sword, trust in your armor over your arms, and let mercy triumph over justice.”
Mercy? In hell? Well, you’d be surprised.
Borrowing from the tradition
It’s said that good writers borrow and great writers steal; in “The Eighth Arrow,” Wetta has crafted a moving and highly entertaining redemption arc for one of literature’s most beloved thieves (a clever trickster and a liar, Odysseus also tried to steal the sheep of Polyphemus), creatively appropriating from both Homer and Virgil.
Naturally the idea of a jailbreak from hell requires the type of theological suspension of belief familiar to readers of C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce,” which also receives a nod early in the story. In a subtle reassurance to the reader, the Parthenos calls Odysseus’s no-way-out-but-through escape from the underworld his “purgation and witness.”
Witness he does, amassing a surprising number of friends and allies during his descent through the nine rings toward Lake Cocytus, the lowest layer and dwelling place of Satan, himself transitioning from remorseless liar to honest hero over the course of the harrowing journey. Insomuch as the underworld is a “geography” of Odysseus’s soul, it becomes a geography of the reader’s as well; stripped of their temporal allure, sin and its consequences become synonymous in Hades, revealing its tedium and banality. Hell, it turns out, is boring: with the exception of the City of Limbo, there is little comfort or novelty to be found anywhere.
The real life of the story, therefore, comes not so much from the misery of the Inferno, but from the souls that inhabit it. Even as shades, it’s clear that they’re the realest thing around, and it is the personal stories of those whom Odysseus and Diomedes meet along the way that make for a richly compelling novel.
Of course, as in all good stories, it is life that triumphs in the end — even, so it seems, in the land of eternal death. If you’re searching in this chilly and darkening time of year for a book to remind you that death will lose its sting and the gates of hell will not prevail, “The Eighth Arrow” certainly meets the mark.
