Matilda Leyser’s debut novel offers an ancient framework for a contemporary emergency: the climate crisis. Her focus is the story of Persephone, goddess of death and fertility, whose annual emergence from the underworld signals spring and whose annual return presages its end. Leyser joins authors such as Pat Barker, Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes in revising the heavy grammar, dusty plains and male traditions of ancient stories for a modern – and female – audience. In giving voice to female characters these authors have taken in experiences such as pregnancy, postnatal depression and menstruation to convey the rawness of life for which we still turn to Greek tragedy. In Leyser’s novel, for example, Persephone’s complicated relationship with her mother, Demeter, is seen in domestic terms, bound up with Persephone’s eating disorder: “she forced the polenta into me, pulled my jaw open … I wanted the hunger because it was mine. The food was hers”.
No Season but the Summer begins underground, where Persephone’s marriage to Hades is largely built on silence, trust and touch. Hades’ kingdom is dark and disorientating, and there is little need for her senses there. Above ground we encounter a different helplessness. Demeter, the book’s other narrator, whose domain is harvest and agriculture, is losing the fight against deforestation. “The winters are warming”, Hades threatens her. “You have lost control.” There are plans to build a new road that will cut through several fields and her own home: somewhat inexplicably, the goddess of the harvest lives on the outskirts of Oxford. (Even on May morning it could never match the hedonism of Mount Olympus). Nature is the novel’s primary anxiety, but it is interwoven with another classical value, the importance of hospitality and the central role of the domestic hearth. Even though ancient stories had little regard for women’s voices, they often respected the spaces that were defined as “feminine.”
The fight against the road reinvigorates Persephone from several thousand years of teenage angst. Her activism leads her to a group of environmentalists who live in trees and lay themselves down in front of excavators. Leyser’s Persephone operates in the limbo of several competing worlds: as well as the summer-winter thing there is a human-immortal complication. The road bridges them all. It intrudes on the tense contract of her marriage; Hades has given his mother-in-law until the harvest before he will bring Persephone underground permanently. In turn, Persephone is hiding a pregnancy with one of the environmentalists, Snow, who wishes to know very little about the child and does not intend to be a good father.
To resituate an ancient myth in this way, it is worth remembering the space the gods filled in their original stories. They were the anthropomorphized council of elders who watched the Trojan War from Olympus, but also the embodiment of war itself; the manifestation of the sea and sky; not only the human act of the harvest, but the idea of the harvest. No Season but the Summer is not always certain of the gods’ importance to their own domains. Persephone observes of Demeter: “Her version of divinity is so down to earth – cups of tea, meals on the table, weeds to pull up”.
This is not to say that the regime of twelve Olympian gods cannot weaken and die to great effect – but it is difficult to take Zeus’ divinity seriously when he is only shown as drunk and gormless at the Download festival. In one of the novel’s best set pieces Leyser marries the “old gods” with the new world at a midsummer party, thrown by Demeter in defiance of the road and of Persephone’s husband. Like all good Greek tragedies it descends into a cruel family argument. The gods are at their most contradictory here, and there is an exciting glimmer of their original power.
No Season but the Summer is strongest when it uses the conflict between immortality and decay to make us think about the climate crisis. Matilda Leyser’s invocation of Greek mythology in this context is innovative, but her decision to allow her gods to deteriorate comes at the cost of their symbolic sovereignty over nature. We are ultimately left wondering where the power lies in the world they have left behind.
Lily Herd is an assistant editor at the TLS
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