Tongues, Book 1 by Anders Nilsen

I don't know why Anders Nilsen is coy with some of the names in this retelling of Greek mythology in the modern day. One of his main characters is clearly Prometheus - even if there were any doubt or possible nuance, he's visited by his brother Epimetheus. Explicitly brother, explicitly named Epimetheus. There's also Gyges Hekantonchieres, here female, but clearly the hundred-handed monster of the Titans' generation from mythology and the daughter of "the Voice," which I take to be Gaia. [1]

But the Zeus figure is called The Omega, and Nilsen's explanatory text explicitly says he is "considered by some to be the return of the Roman god Jupiter" - even though, in the book, we see him millennia ago, so calling it a "return" is a bit of a red herring.

Perhaps Nilsen is trying to be pan-mythological, at least in a small way - another character is Athena-Seshat, yoking somewhat similar figures from Greek and Egyptian myth into one character. That's the only reference to non-Greek myth I noticed, though. For more of the vague names, the Omega's top lieutenants are Might (probably Typhon) and his "partner" Violence (thus maybe Echidna), who are here to be threatening, violent, powerful, and loyal, but not to actually do much.

Prometheus is called The Prisoner, which of course he is. He's chained to a mountain cliff, somewhere dusty and desert. His immediate surroundings, though, have bloomed and flowered, because spilling the blood of an immortal - The Prisoner calls himself and his family "gods," even though, in Greek myth, the generation of the Titans were distinctly a different thing from the subsequent generation, the actual gods - does have effects, over the long years.

But there are three strands to the story here. All are caught up in this ancient war of the gods and Titans (I perhaps shouldn't use that word; Nilsen never does). All are in this dusty desert landscape, which is never named explicitly but seems to be more Iraq - or perhaps I should say Mesopotamia - than the Greek mountains. And I expect they will all come together in the end.

I have to expect, because that ending is not in this book. Even at three-hundred-plus pages, Tongues, Book 1 does not come to a conclusion. It stops at a imagistic moment that could serve as an ending, if it had to, but the three plots are still separate, and the fate of humanity still in the balance.

The Prisoner is one strand. We see him chained to that cliff, in the modern day and in the distant past. He talks to the eagle who comes every day to eat his liver - mostly the current eagle, since all mortals die, and "the eagle" is a millennia-long sequence of mother and daughter eagles, generation after generation. This lineage of eagles talks, because they have been eating The Prisoner's liver for those long ages, and Nilsen shows us some of the process by which the earliest eagles learned to speak.

Tongues is about language, at its core, or at least the Prisoner's strand is. The ability of language to chain and control and define the world, maybe - the way it confers power. What the Prisoner gave humanity, in this telling, is explicitly language, not fire.

Another strand of the story is the orphan girl Astrid, found like Moses floating down a stream as a baby, raised by a middle-class family in what I think is Kenya. Nilsen heavily hints that she is the reincarnation of the first real human, who The Prisoner pulled from the mud, saving her from suffocation, millennia ago. That first human went to live in a village of hominids who looked just like her, but didn't have her facility with language - until she joined them, when her example sparked the same transformation in the children, and cascaded from there down through the ages to make our modern world.

Astrid is guided by a talking chicken that calls herself Hermaea - I think she is meant to be a female version of Hermes rather than a gastropod - as part of a vast conspiracy among the "gods" to kill The Omega. The Prisoner has predicted that death, which may have been the inciting reason for his imprisonment. And Astrid is very clearly the possible manifestation of that prophecy, though only possible: nothing is predetermined in Nilsen's telling, but some outcomes can be seen and planned for.

So Astrid - a girl, maybe ten years old - is being groomed to murder a god. A god who is also the head of an insurgent group, or possibly even quasi-ruling force, in this unsettled region. His armed forces are called the Rings; they seem to be mostly humans, though led by at least a few gods. (Again, Nilsen calls them gods, but, aside from Athena-Seshat and The Omega, they seem to be from the prior generation.  We do see a background character who may be Hephaestus.)

The third strand is the least connected, and seems to be taking place slightly before the Astrid sections. An American young man with a teddy bear strapped to his backpack is wandering through this region. We don't know his real name; he gets called "Teddy Roosevelt" by two mercenaries or military contractors who pick him up. He may be a pawn on The Omega's side, part of a plan to foil the assassination attempt, or maybe something more complicated.

"Teddy" did something horrible - we think mostly accidentally, or thoughtlessly - back at home, and is traveling to atone for it, or to obliterate his memory, or hoping for a random death somewhere foreign. Teddy probably couldn't tell us which, either. He is picked up by those two violent men, on the roadside in this dangerous desert - dangerous inherently, from the heat and the lack of food, and dangerous because of the Rings and the (unnamed, unseen, implied) other forces the Rings are fighting.

There's one last major element: The Cube. Astrid has it, Teddy dreams of it. It's brightly colored, filled with something amorphous and unreal, an eruption of the numinous and godlike into everyday life. It has something to do with The Omega - embodies or contains some of his power, maybe, or possibly is the one thing that can kill him. The Omega knows it is out there, and is seeking it - as are his minions. 

Nilsen bounces among those three main storylines - The Prisoner, Astrid, Teddy - and some secondary points of view, including The Omega (appearing as a Swan to a woman in the mythological past, talking to The Prisoner, working with his minions, being mysterious and knowledgeable). Again, this is Book 1 - it doesn't end, exactly.

But it is full of fascinating images and thoughts, driven by the conversations among the large cast and their various dangerous situations. Nilsen's pages, as in his previous major book, Big Questions, are laid out like no one else's, with odd-sized panels crawling across backgrounds or expanses of white, sometimes cramming together as if compacted, sometimes soaring separately across the page like eagles. Those panels are, I think, never square - his central shape is that hexagon on the cover, and his panels are hexagonal as much as anything else. They're not regular, but their sides have two or three line segments, possibly rotating or morphing under the weight of the story.

There is also a lot of philosophizing in Tongues; a reader has to be willing to take long stretches of a chained Prisoner debating the purpose and worth of humanity with his various visitors, plus more pointed, immediate conversations involving Astrid (and various gods) or Teddy (and various violence-minded men). There is a lot to think through here: Tongues is a deep and rich work, both in its story and the telling, even if it's still unfinished.

If you're in the mood for a philosophical, mythological mediation on whether the human race is salvageable or not - or is inherently twisted, so that the world is clearly better off without us - you will want to take a look at Tongues.

[1] This gender-swap somewhat sets up a battle-of-the-sexes element that stays undertone throughout this book. This is Book 1, so it may rise higher in the narrative before the end.