Book review: Fruit Of The Dead uses Hades and Persephone to tackle addiction and exploitation

Fruit Of The Dead

By Rachel LyonFiction/Scribner/Paperback/300 pages/$20.52/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4cAYkpq)
3 stars

“I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” goes the latest in vogue TikTok hook.

Whether it is invoked in ironic jest or, equally likely, with faux irony and so, some sincerity, the age-old aspiration of women marrying into wealth appears to be having a new summer.

Rachel Lyon’s relevant retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone, Fruit Of The Dead, is a reminder of the dangers of this trope.

Published in the wake of the conviction of financier Jeffrey Epstein and the ongoing scandal surrounding the Sackler family, who owned Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company, it recontextualises contemporary debates of the ethics of exploitative age-gap relationships and addictive painkillers into an age-old tale.

The pomegranate that keeps Persephone in the underworld for a third of the year in the original lore has been substituted with the opioid-like red pill Granadone, peddled by the mysterious mogul Hades/Rolo Picazo.

The guileless Persephone becomes the barely 18-year-old Cory Ansel. While under the influence, the beautiful slacker in a feud with her mum is enticed to babysit Rolo’s kids, signing a non-disclosure agreement and whisked away to the isolated Ile des Bienheureux – Island of the Blessed.

In exchange for her autonomy – and Wi-Fi connection – she is awarded luxury, a liberal supply of drugs and an avenue of escape from thinking about her derailed life.

She understands the cost of business. Rolo oscillates between simpering solicitousness and toxic control, instructing Cory on how to take a compliment and insisting on feeding her the “perfect bite”.

The masterstroke here is that Lyon makes the kidnapping voluntary without the troublesome romance.

Cory mostly finds Rolo repulsive, and is able to keep her developing Stockholm syndrome under control. Lyon makes her all the more sympathetic as a young girl who willingly commits to an unequal dynamic believing that she could benefit or even thrive from the arrangement.

Snippets from the Homeric hymn to Demeter act as chapter titles, loosely tracing the arc of the original story where Demeter braves the underworld in search of her daughter.

This mother, unlike the virtuous Demeter, is pleasingly imperfect, Lyon’s efforts perhaps to problematise the perfect mother held to impossible standards. Emer is the head of a fraudulent non-governmental organisation whose project of “magic rice” in China has failed.

Exposed, she retorts: “The world is beyond saving.”

Her perspective, written in the first person in jittery, often onomatopoeic prose, is the heart of the novel, containing an orality and heart-thumping quality that is tiresome but works – from the “Slam, slam, where are we going ma’am?” as she boards a taxi, to her archaic lamentations for her daughter that approximates the cadences of epics (“daughter of splendor, daughter of heartbreak, daughter of elusion”).

Yet, the familiar architecture of this tale means there is a drag on the tension that is never properly overcome.

Lyon, a detailed chronicler of Rolo’s insular world, stretches the novel without necessarily adding to it. She clearly has great fun writing about the different kinds of egg-shaped rarities Rolo plants around the island for a spontaneous Easter egg hunt and displays a command of very specific nouns, yet this remains much ado about nothing, conjuring the reverie of the island without much enjoyment for the reader.

But with its gestures towards the fabulist and engagement with contemporary issues, this is already one of the better offerings of the tired genre of Greek rewrites.

What about the Romans, or more specific ethnic or regional lore? The canvas of history and myth offers richer territory for the more audacious author to discover.

If you like this, read: Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, 2023, $25, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/45PGzAE). An ambitious narrative about the afterlife of Anglo-Saxon prior Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, boasting playful typography and structural experiments.