Delphi A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Poet Pollard's debut novel is a dreamy meditation on classical and contemporary practices of prophecy set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. The unnamed narrator is a classics professor living with her husband, Jason, and their pre-teen son, Xander, in London. As she ponders the many ways the ancient Greeks attempted to divine the future, using birds, entrails, and human sacrifice, the world locks down as the plague spreads, and she finds herself turning to methods of augury still practiced today, such as tarot readings and I Ching. Being trapped in her home with Jason and Xander forces her to work harder than ever to hide from the fact that both her marriage and her son are troubled. Her burgeoning attraction to a nonbinary colleague is a welcome if potentially dangerous distraction. Some readers may find Pollard's focus on life during COVID-19 and stream-of-consciousness a bit off-putting, but lovers of literary fiction and classical mythology will find much to enjoy here, and two late-in-the-plot developments serve as sobering reminders that few escape the pandemic unscathed.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Poet Pollard (The Heavy-Petting Zoo) follows an unnamed professor and mother's adjustment to the Covid-19 lockdown in her richly layered debut novel. The narrator's interior monologue alternates between racing panic and numbed tedium as she juggles a classics course, a translation project, and research on divination methods for her next book. As her 10-year-old son, Xander, deals with depression, and the two become increasingly isolated, she calls upon German words to define her state of mind. The novel is separated into short chapters, each named after a form of prophecy she's been researching, which she connects to her attempts to cope with the new normal (in "Tarotmancy: Prophecy by Tarot," she counts Xander among her mixed blessings while drawing a tarot card from a deck). In some chapters, the narrator meditates monotonously for several pages on what happens during a single hour; in others, she rushes through a matter of months in a few paragraphs. The uneven pacing creates discomfort, which seems to be the point; though Pollard's fractured narrative is difficult to get through at times, it effectively conveys the first year of the pandemic. It's low-key compared to other recent pandemic fiction, but the main character's frustration and fear is sure to strike a chord. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT Written at a feverish pace once her own children returned to school, London poet/playwright Pollard's exquisitely painful debut recaps the hellish first year of the COVID pandemic. COVID hits England just as the unnamed 45-year-old narrator, a British academic and translator, begins a novel about prophecies and Greek myths. As the lockdown drags on, she, her husband, and their 10-year-old son grow short-tempered and emotionally distant from one another. The narrator recounts the details of their yearlong suffering in short journal entries labeled with specific prophecies: Ovomancy covers the dilemma of safe travel (the family scraps their plan to go to Delphi for Easter), while in Cybermancy she's aghast at the fallout for students learning online. With the help of online psychics, Tarot apps, and the I Ching, she desperately searches for signs pointing to the end of the COVID nightmare, blinding her to a looming family disaster playing out before her. VERDICT Pollard's deft inclusion of all the pandemic's practical and political challenges--masks, vaccines, social distancing, the strain on shared home WiFi networks, long separations from aging parents, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and January 6--is wrapped in the inventive framework of prophecies. Irresistible and also oddly reassuring for all who have come through (so far) to the other side of COVID's miseries.--Beth E. Andersen

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A British classics professor intersperses her lockdown diary with a taxonomy of ancient systems of prophecy. The unnamed narrator of Pollard's debut novel titles each of her short chapters with a method of foretelling the future, starting with "Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events" and ending with "Dactylomancy: Prophecy by Means of Finger Movements." Upon a random check, even the kookier-sounding ones--"Urticariaomancy: Prophecy by Itches," "Ololygmancy: Prophecy by the Howling of Dogs"--are authentic. The entries narrate experiences and emotions familiar from our recent collective experiment in uncertainty, from home schooling to craft cocktails to Zoom exhaustion and news addiction. In fact, except for some slight variations since the book is set in the U.K., it all feels so familiar and real that it has the feeling of a time capsule that's been opened many years too soon--though Pollard, the author of six books of poetry, is at pains to bookend her narrative with assurances that it is fictional. The narrator teaches a screenful of students with their cameras off, deals with her 10-year-old son's increasing dependence on screens even as she follows on her own screen the unfolding nightmares of Sarah Everard (a young woman who was murdered in London) and Donald Trump. She tries an I Ching app, visits an online psychic, does tarot readings. She keeps getting the family happiness card even as her husband steps up his drinking and the marriage frays. Finally she decides to jump the fence and go for a walk only to run into an acquaintance who complains about her au pair, leading her to rush home in horror. "I haven't missed small talk" is one of many wry, relatable moments--but these might be funnier later on. Here and there, big plot elements drop in like stones, with little buildup or aftermath, including a last-minute bit of terrifying melodrama with mythic overtones. Re-creates the particular frustration, tedium, and fear of 2020 and 2021 with depressing verisimilitude. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1. Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don't want anything to do with it; don't want it near me. No one used to have to deal with this much future. I mean, the future, so far as they could imagine, would have been fairly like the past: harvest, solstice, snow, trees coming into bud. They would get older and die, but the cycle would begin again. We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we're in the future, already--that dystopian future of surveillance, video calls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalization, and the 24-hour news saying AI extinction event gene-modification the collapse of civilization. So it is that, somehow, one winter night, I find myself standing in my kitchen, hissing shrilly at my husband: I don't know if my son will even live to middle age . Something can be melodramatic and true at the same time. In Delphi, gods spoke through oracles. Delphi is in Greece, on multiple plateaux along the slope of Mount Parnassus. The myth says that Zeus wanted to find the centre of Gaia--the Greek personification of the Earth, our primordial mother--so sent two eagles soaring from the east and west. The spot where their flight paths crossed over Delphi was declared the navel of Gaia, sometimes also known as the Omphalos. Delphi belonged to Gaia, then, but Apollo slayed the dragon who guarded it, the Python (from the verb pytho , "to rot"), and stole the land from her. To legitimize his theft, a sanctuary was built for him above the deep, zigzagged chasm into which he had pushed the Python's dying body. There they later installed the Pythia, a priestess named after that rotting-dragon smell. The famous oracle of Delphi. By custom, she was an older woman--what we might call middle-aged--and often poor. Someone who had led an ordinary life but who was willing to sever ties with her husband or children completely and erase herself. To become a blank; become instrument. Before the oracle could begin there was a ritual: priests sprinkled a goat with cool water. If it didn't shiver there would be another month's wait; if it shivered, they could proceed, sacrificing it and burning the flesh. Rising smoke signalled the oracle was open. Next, the Pythia was purified by fasting and bathing in a spring. They seem to have burned laurel leaves to cleanse her, or else she chewed them. Purple veiled, she was taken down into a dark, enclosed inner sanctum and placed on a gilded tripod that teetered over the fissure. I wonder if her heart was panting? I wonder if she was afraid? The room was low and dim; she trembled as fumes rose from the decomposing dragon, sly, sweet, lifting vapours that lurched her into a blood-thumping blur or violent trance, her limbs loosened from her own control. She jangled above the pit, enlarging. Apollo moved the bones of her jaw, her clump of tongue, to speak through her mouth--a male voice issuing furious barks, a roar. The historian and essayist Plutarch, who worked as a priest at Delphi, attributed her ecstasies to the pneuma: the breath of the fault in the rock. He wrote rather memorably that she looked like a windswept ship. It was probably anaesthetic, the rock's breath--sugared ethylene or ethane, a heavy, crawling asphyxiant. The sanctuary lacked oxygen. And therefore, lo: the future spilt from her mouth-- Excerpted from Delphi: A Novel by Clare Pollard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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