Book Review: Stone Blind

Medusa is probably one of the most well-known characters from Greek myth. The hideous Gorgon creature with snakes for hair and cursed for a lifetime with a gaze that could turn any living thing to stone. Her place in the Greek pantheon is well touted and she is most well known for being defeated by the hero Perseus, after beheading her and using her decapitated head as a weapon and later trading it to the goddess Athena. All throughout time, her imposing image and threat has been interpreted across many forms of media, all with the intent of showing her as the malevolent deity she was considered to be. However, when you look deeper into her origins, there is no doubt some tragedy behind it. It’s a common belief that no one is truly born evil and that it’s the events that transpire in your life that mold you into the person you end up being; for good or worse. So, in light of that consideration, what is it that made Medusa the evil legend that she is know for today? Well, that’s a tale Natalie Haynes tries to explore with her novel Stone Blind.

The story of Stone Blind follows the perspectives of a lot of central characters from Greek mythos. Characters like Perseus, Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Hephaestus and Athena. The main perspective is primarily on Medusa herself. With each characters own personal sub-plot taking place parallel to one another, the main structure of the narrative follows Medusa as she seeks to weave her existence from a young age and the tragedy that befalls her when the Greek gods interject themselves in her life. At the same time, young half-god Perseus is tasked by a selfish king to find and bring him the head of a legendary Gorgon, a quest he willingly goes on to save the fate of his human mother. This task will have him face his own trials and encounters with the Greek pantheon, who seek to aid him at the behest of his father Zeus. His journey and Medusa’s come to a cross roads and the narrative picks up on their unwilling partnership and the journey they must take to finish Perseus’ quest.

I will be honest with you, I did not like the narrative of this book all that much. I appreciate a lot of this is based on already established narratives from Greek mythology and Natalie Haynes probably had a harder job than most having to structure her own narrative while juggling all these hard-established events and character moments. I think where Natalie gets away with it is in the moments in-between. There’s some attempt to characterize these well-known gods in a way mythology never really afforded. It's a valid attempt and I can see the effort is there, but to me some of it comes off as quite crude. The overall structure of this story is so jumbled I find. For a book that promises to have Medusa as the central crux of the plot, she has to share a lot of it’s page count with other characters. I think this contributes to the overall issue that the aim of re-telling Medusa’s plot from a different perspective is faltered here because she really isn’t given the rightful definition or exposure she needed to justify that. Also, trigger warning for people who have suffered sexual assault; but there is a rather alarming amount of it in this story. While I respect Haynes for sticking true to what was probably an already established element of the real mythology, it’s usage here feels shallow and uncomfortable. These sexual attacks are always often at the expense of the central female characters and there’s no justification for them apart to give the female characters a tragedy to develop with. There is a very fine line in storytelling when you use sexual abuse as a plot tool, and while I respect it may be established in the lore of this world, I for one did not find any value in its portrayal or usage here.

I think this leads onto one of my major issues with the book and that is its tone. I appreciate the Greek pantheon were not a nice bunch, despite what other media might try to convince you otherwise; but nearly everyone in this book comes off as a real asshole. These characters are all motivated by selfish means and they are constantly trying to upend each other. Even the main characters like Perseus or Medusa have their own negative aspects which make it hard to fully emphasize with them. I get that this may be the point Haynes is trying to get at, that no one in this mythical world or our real world is ever really inherently good and that we are molded by the suffering we are subjected to and we subject it to others to repeat a nasty cycle. While I appreciate the intent, it doesn’t make for a all too pleasant reading experience when everyone in this story comes off as either unlikable or downright horrid. That constant negativity can be very draining and again, the use of rather mature and sexual concepts doesn’t help the book feel any more mature, if anything the way it’s presented in the story gives it a rather immature styling.

Pacing is another tell-all issue of this book. Consisting of 384 pages, this isn’t a quick read sort of experience and dear lord does this story drag itself along most of the time. I appreciate there’s a desire to flesh characters out to allow the reader to fully understand them, but there are segments in this book which really don’t add all that much and just feel like padding. It felt like Haynes knew she had to tell the story of Perseus and his journey to kill Medusa, but she really wanted to tell a different story in-between the moments of respite. This causes a really conflicting clash between the main plot and its constant sub-plots that again, just hinders the general progression of the story constantly.

The concept of Stone Blind isn’t without its merits, it was pretty much the main reason I took an interest in the story. The complexity of the Greek Pantheon and the depth of the mythology is really interesting but I just feel like that complexity is lost in this story. It’s a story which struggles to keep up with itself and struggles to motivate the reader with an incredibly heavy and often at times immature tone. The book isn’t a complete write-off though, I can appreciate Haynes attempt to define the true nature of the Greek gods and the story is at least original in the way it shows to interpret that, but it isn’t enough for me to comfortably recommend this for other people to read.