Marina Warner: The Leto Bundle

By ELSPETH SANDYS*

One of the main characters in The Leto Bundle - the enigmatic schoolteacher Kim McQuy - believes tribalism to be the root of all evil. He has a vision, enshrined in the movement known as HSWU (History Starts With Us), of "a mongrelised, non-native state," where history is contained in a way that prevents it from contaminating the present.

"I want to build ... dams to prevent the mud [of history] sliding down on us," Kim confides to Dr Hortense Fernly, the museum curator whose reluctant support for his movement - and whose equally reluctant love - he has secured.

Elsewhere, Kim talks of the "mongrelisation" of Britain, called in the novel, "Albion," a nation that has been "crossed and crossed again by people from here there and everywhere." It is a process, he informs a meeting called by the newly formed Department of Cultural Identities, that Salman Rushdie has compared to "chutnification; the blending of spices and herbs and the fruits of the earth."

If there were any doubts that Marina Warner's main preoccupation in this amazing, visionary novel is to question the very roots of national identity, Kim McQuy's impassioned statements should dispel them. Warner turns the idea of national identity on its head, positing instead an "alternative history," a history of the spirit. "Facing forward with the future in our faces, not looking backwards, at some exhausted notion of heritage," says Kim.

For New Zealand readers, whatever their ethnic origin, the challenge is obvious. The word "mongrel" appears many times in the text. "We're none of us the real thing," pop singer Grammercy Poule declares in her speech to open a "traditional" English harvest fair. "We're all of us mixed up, and we have to ... question the past in order to make ourselves a new future." She concludes with a statement that is in itself a challenge: "There's no ethnicity that's clean."

That a formidable intelligence is at work in this novel is never in any doubt. Warner, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1988, the first woman to be invited to give the Reith Lectures, a powerful advocate for feminism, prize-winning author of seven novels and numerous books and articles on myth and fairy tale, has given us a distillation of all these preoccupations, in a tale as readable as a murder mystery.

Some suspension of disbelief is necessary if we are to follow the fortunes of Leto, the mythical figure at the centre of the story, but never for a moment does the author's grasp of her complex narrative slip.

Leto, one of the Titan goddesses, is raped by Zeus. Pregnant with twins, she's hounded across the face of the Earth by Zeus' jealous wife, Hera. Sheltered by wolves, she is eventually incorporated into human society, though not in such a way that she can ever feel safe.

Leto is Laetitia, a 12th-century Christian saint; she is Lettice, a stowaway (with her twins), adopted by the Victorian archaeologist, Sir Giles Skipwith; she is Ella, a maid in a hotel in war-torn Tirzahner (the Balkans); she is Nellie, who looks after animals (and chooses a wolf for her pet) on Grammercy Poule's country estate.

Leto is the goddess of diaspora. She belongs nowhere, has no history, speaks no language as mother tongue, yet she is the embodiment of the "interminable destiny of maternity." As she moves across continents and through time, her concern is always, and overridingly, for the safety of her twins.

Conceived in rape, hatched out of an egg, possessing no navels, they become, as the story progresses towards the present, more and more like the sons and daughters of our own time. Phoebus and Phoebe stand for all those children, born in suffering, raised in the midst of war and persecution, who cling to life with the fierceness of the survivor; he, or she, who has looked into the dark, but manages, by some miracle, to believe in the light.

What Warner seems to be saying is that great suffering obliterates memory, leaving only the hunger for life. Leto (Ella) sells her son to an English couple visiting Tirzahner in the aftermath of the four-year siege of its capital, Tirzah.

She does this, not just to give him the chance of a good life, but to raise money for medicines. Phoebe has been cruelly burned in a bombing raid. It is the photo of her that has shocked the world into an understanding of what has been going on in Tirzahner. (The novel is full of echoes such as this one of the photo of the naked girl fleeing her village in Vietnam after a napalm attack.)

At the end of the war Leto and Phoebe are brought to Albion, where Phoebe, in a magical twist of the plot, is operated on, and given a new skin. Without giving away too much of the story, Leto does rediscover her son, but the "recognition" remains one-sided.

As Leto and her daughter fight for the right to remain in Albion, the cult of Leto, centred on the bundle of manuscripts housed in the Museum of Albion, grows. Kim hears Leto's voice, speaking to him through time.

He tells Hetty Fernly that "she's the same person then now forever ... she's hyper real so she's always alive." Leto has become the focus for people's feelings of belonging and not belonging.

Her mythical resistance to the evil of the world, coupled with her fierce protection of her twins, comes to symbolise the rights of people who have no homeland, other than the one they find themselves in by fate or chance. Leto is the voice of "history now."

The relevance of The Leto Bundle to issues of identity and multiculturalism, as well as to the vexed subject of migration and the status of refugees, in no way detracts from the novel's readability. There were passages, especially in the e-mail exchanges between Kim and Hetty, where I found myself laughing out loud. And there is no doubt that Warner has her tongue firmly in her cheek at times.

Some critics have described The Leto Bundle as satire. I disagree. The questions it asks are central to our times: the way forward, suggested through the words of Kim, and Leto herself, nothing short of inspired.

Chatto and Windus

$55

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.