Bright Air Black by David Vann — mother’s ruin

At first sight David Vann’s new novel appears to be a radical departure from his previous works, which have mostly been set in contemporary America. In Bright Air Black we find ourselves in a boat off the coast of Bronze Age Persia, plunged headlong into the nightmarish world of Medea, one of the most notorious women in western mythology, famous for one horrifying deed: the murder of her own children.

The story has been revisited countless times over the centuries. The Greek tragedian Euripides, whose version premiered in 431BC, was by no means the first to tackle it. Corneille, Charpentier, Handel, William Morris and Samuel Barber have followed, to name but a few. Different renderings ascribe different motivations to Medea’s actions, and different consequences, reflecting the cultural climate of the times. In Euripides’ play, from which Vann draws his title, Medea initially evokes our sympathy. Abandoned for another woman by her husband Jason, for whom Medea sacrificed her homeland, betrayed her father and murdered her brother, she now faces banishment from Corinth. But as the shape of her terrible, coolly premeditated revenge becomes apparent, sympathy falls away. For an ancient Greek audience, her burning desire for vengeance and her brutal method of achieving it represent all that is alien and inimical to civilised life, exemplified by the ideals of order and control.

In Bright Air Black, Vann begins the story at a much earlier point and has the trajectory of sympathy work the other way. We meet Medea for the first time on board the Argo, kneeling in the still-warm gore of the brother whose throat she has recently slit, while hurling chunks of his corpse into the sea to delay the pursuit of her father, whom she has deceived and betrayed. “She has done this for Jason and will do more, she knows. Her brother dismembered at her feet. This is how the world begins.”

Princess, priestess, niece of the witch Circe, grand-daughter of the sun god, Helios, Medea is noble-born and semi-divine, which in Vann’s retelling is central to her character. His Medea is not a woman to pity. She is ambitious, proud and lethal. Soul-sister of Lilith not Eve. A sorceress in the service of Hekate, she believes in power and fear, not gods. This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men.

Vann strips away the softer parts of Medea’s character as ruthlessly as Medea slits throats. She is not blinded by love for Jason but steered by cool calculation, exchanging one kind of bondage for another. When she and Jason are enslaved by King Pelias (who ordered the golden fleece expedition to rid himself of Jason), she silently bides her time until she can exact revenge and break free. Medea’s capacity for violence is there from the start, not a solitary response to sexual rejection.

The centrepiece of Bright Air Black is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene, described in stomach-churning detail. The quadruple murders in Corinth of King Creon, his daughter Glauce, and her sons, Aeson and Promachus are strangely gentle by contrast. Medea is blank with her own suffering. “Nothing in her veins but air, no organs, hollowed chest . . . Walk of the dead . . . Body without weight, leaving no shadow.” Her jealousy and anger are channelled into actions, not feelings. The slaying of her sons is depicted with such tenderness it has the unsettling effect of seeming almost an act of kindness. “She lifts his face to hers, kisses him as the blade cuts through, holds him tight to let him know he is not alone, is loved, puts her cheek against his for last warmth.” Vann leaves us with the troubling paradox that murderous Medea is also a devoted mother.

The centrepiece is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene

Vann evokes this visceral, sensual, brutal world of warring city states, capricious gods and fragile human agency in a fractured prose style, reminiscent of ancient Greek drama and poetry. Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over. “Lost and no path, only blind flight until a hill falls toward a mirror, a sea too calm to be called a sea, only a pool of dark water waiting and catching flame.” The airless intensity of page after page of this takes some getting used to but keeps us located in time and in Medea’s point of view, hinting at something within her that is broken and damaged.

Sympathy for Medea builds as Vann shows us the world she inhabits, in which violence is close up and personal, sexual abuse normal, torture and slaughter routine. His Medea is a victim and a survivor. The time and the place may be very different from his previous novels, but Bright Air Black shares the same central structure of a searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature. As Vann himself states, “My novels are all Greek tragedies”. At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two.

Bright Air Black, by David Vann, William Heinemann, RRP£18.99, 272 pages

Rebecca Abrams’ ‘The Jewish Journey: 4000 Years in 22 Objects’ is published in October by Ashmolean Books

Illustration by David McConochie