The truth about myths

They'd been translated into 29 different languages, from Chinese to Icelandic, Portuguese to Japanese, and for once all the publishing hype was justified. Never before have so many companies throughout the world linked up for such a simultaneous publication.

But now it's the start of a new week, and at the dining-room table in Byng's spacious Notting Hill home, two of those three writers - Margaret Atwood, the drywitted doyenne of Canadian letters, and Karen Armstrong, the former nun who is now one of the world's most concise and elegant writers on religion - are starting to flesh out that dream, each signing 1,500 copies of their books. Jeanette Winterson, the third of Byng's authors, is missing, presumed exhausted, having already signed her own quota.

They break off for lunch, ready to talk about their books instead of scribbling their signature on them. For Armstrong, that means discussing what the modern world has lost by dismissing the mythical underpinning of our culture (what the ancient Greeks called mythos) in favour of rational knowledge (logos). For Atwood, it means explaining why she wanted to write about the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus's wife Penelope - and particularly that of her 12 maids, who were all hanged when the conquering hero returned to Ithaca. There were, she suggests, a few possible reasons - their deaths might have been honour killings, or to prevent them revealing Penelope's infidelities with the suitors occupying Odysseus's palace at Ithaca, or the whole story might have had a wider, mythic, meaning.

Atwood: When I read about the hanged maids, I thought, there's something wrong here. Those maids were left dangling at the end of the Odyssey in such an unjust way. Even when I was 15, I thought that. I noticed that even when the BBC read the Odyssey on the radio, they left out the story of the maids. James Joyce didn't put them into Ulysses either. It's because there's this guy in the story that we've quite liked up to now and then he hangs the maids...

They were basically people who got crushed under the wheel of fate. The Greeks raided, raped, pushed males off cliffs and enslaved women and children. There were many, many victims, many people who could reasonably say "Why me?", like Job said "Why me? Why am I covered with boils?" And logos has no answer to that.

Armstrong: That's why we turn to myths, to these stories of the inner life of mankind. If your child dies or you're witnessing the horrors of something like hurricane Katrina or the tsunami, of course you need to know what happened and why. But that isn't going to assuage the grief, turbulence and inner despair of that inner world. But myths - stories, novels, poems - can.

Myths are about the unknown, stories that help us find our place in the world, explaining the sublime and that there's more to life than meets the eye. At their best, they can teach us compassion and make us live more fully.

Of course, there are loads of bad myths, like the revival of the ancient Germanic myths in the Third Reich, or al-Qaeda, which is an entirely new rehash of the whole Islamic package. But there are good myths too, like that of the hero, about how you have to be bold and strike out for yourself on a lonely path, go out into the unknown, face all kinds of dangers, and come back with something that is of value to your community.

The point about myths is that they are never ever definitive. Sophocles changed the myth of Oedipus, for example, and made him tear his eyes out.

Atwood: The Romantics went for Prometheus, who had the temerity to steal fire from the gods and was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten out by an eagle every day as punishment. He had defied the established order, so people like Blake, Byron and Shelley went for him in a big way.

Armstrong: Yes, but that's another one whose meaning has changed. Originally it was about man's place in the order of things, saying that man could never be a god: it's only relatively recently that the emphasis we placed on the story switched to make it about defiance.

In the Bible too, you can see myths constantly changing or two different versions of the same creation myth put side by side. That's because what we're talking about here is the ineffable, sometimes the unspeakable, and so myth is just one way of saying something, but there can be other ways too. Before the modern age, people read the scriptures in a very symbolic, meaningful and metaphorical way - they were capable of myriad interpretations. The idea that there is just one way of interpreting Jesus is entirely from the modern period.

These days, we've got rather lazy about myth. In popular parlance now it just means something that's not true. Really, myths tell us what we must do to live life more intensely, but it's got to be something we can apply to our own lives. They might, for example, help us to accept our mortality ...

Byng: Or a good modern myth could be anything that involves a transformation, because it reminds people that they have the possibility of changing their lives ...

Armstrong: Poets and writers certainly have not lost sight of the power of myth, even if many religious people have.

Atwood: In a book I wrote called Negotiating with the Dead, I wanted to write about writing and what writers think they are doing when they're doing it. I started by giving all the motives I'd ever come across and by asking other writers for theirs, and looking at prologues from the past. There was no common factor. So I said to novelists, "What does it feel like when you're going into a book?" And they all said, it's dark, like going into a dark room - as Virginia Woolf said, going there with a lamp and lighting up the furniture - but they all mentioned darkness followed by light, every single one.

You have to go into the dark and muck around in there. Maybe you will succeed, maybe you won't, but unless you go into the dark, you're not going to find what you're looking for. My version of that is going to sleep and often - and many people will say this - in the morning it will be there. That's all I can tell you. With this book, I woke up and it was there, the first sentence in the book. And you think "Who am I hearing here?" Well, I knew who it was, so writing the book afterwards was like skiing downhill. But there's a lot of false starts in the labyrinth. Creative people usually can't tell you where they get their ideas from - they're not working with logos.

Byng: That reminds me of a book we're publishing next year by Rebecca Solnit called A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In it she says that unless you get lost, you're not going to find anything new.

Armstrong: But we're all culturally lost at the moment. Even when you're writing a non-fiction book you start off in darkness. Then on the third draft or so, the book starts talking back to you, you're discarding what everyone else has said and it's a long process of distilling what you are trying to say. But no, you can't tamely follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before. There's a passage in the French version of the Holy Grail that says when a knight goes into the dark forest he must not follow an established track or he will never have an adventure. He has to enter the wood at a place where someone has never been before.

Atwood: Try that in Canada and you're a dead duck! Ceftainly there has to be some sort of balance. Having logos without mythos is like having trees without roots and branches. And without mythos, we'd be ants.

Byng: That's right. We're story-telling creatures, born into myth. We need both mythos and logos. I remember hearing Karen at the Edinburgh Book Festival talking about the difference between them so beautifully and articulately saying things I'd been talking to Michael Ondaatje about just minutes earlier, trying to persuade him to write in the series. And I realised then and there that that's what we needed for the series, something that would show its bigger purpose and put it into context. So I asked you to write the book at a party straight afterwards.

Atwood: With me, it was also at the Book Festival, at Channings, the hotel I was staying in - and before breakfast, when I say yes to everything. But I'd known of Canongate when we'd lived in Edinburgh in 1978-9, and I liked the books like The Assassin's Cloak that Jamie'd been publishing, and in any case with my own background in Canada I was conditioned to support small publishers. Then he won the Booker with Life of Pi and I wondered why I'd bothered!

Byng: But Peggy helped me even then. I'd asked her for a quote for Pi and got back the best response I've ever had - a brilliant poem whose subtext was "I only do blurbs for the dead". But she said, "I could review it for you," and we offered that to the Sunday Times. It was a lovely review.

Atwood: It was a book that I thought had been undervalued in Canada. It had masses of mythic material.

Armstrong: We've lost that ability we once had in history to see every stone, every tree in the world as full of divine life. But what we have to learn is to look a different way, just as you learn how to listen to music or how to study poetry.

It happens that the first two books are about Greek myth but the rest of the series goes wider than that. We need to learn to look and for the myths to help us. And what will be so great about this series is that it will draw the people who have dismissed myths, like Plato used to do, as old wives' tales. Because Margaret and Jeanette and all these many other stars are involved, it will will make people engage with these stories differently.

What Atlas did at the end of eternity

WHEN the call came, Jeanette Winterson knew exactly which myth she wanted to write about.

It would be the one about Atlas, the god the ancient Greeks believed carried the whole universe on his shoulders. A sentence formed in her head - "The free man never thinks of escape" - and there it was already: a voice for the old, eternally burdened titan. A voice, a life; and a myth into which she could drop fragments from her own past, spinning out a new kind of old, old story.

"I've always had an Atlas complex," she laughs. "It's a running joke among my friends: that I think I can do everything, should do everything. It is like holding up the world."

In the myth, Atlas gets one break in all eternity - when Heracles calls, on the penultimate of his 12 labours. In exchange for Atlas providing him with the golden apples of the Hesperides, Heracles steps in to shoulder the weight. The old god is briefly free. But although Atlas is tricked into supporting the universe again, Winterson ensures that it won't be for ever: one day he will defy the punishment Zeus ordained for him in perpetuity.

In Weight, the tendrils of Winterson's personal mythology reach out quite clearly into Atlas's story. She introduces a 20th-century toddler, soon to be adopted, who looks up at a big globe light in the orphanage and imagines it to be another world. That young girls's own path through the real world would seem to follow pre-ordained lines, forced along by a fateful, pre-ordained weight.

Winterson doesn't mention her own escape from a childhood as an adopted child of Accrington Pentecostalists that she wrote about so brilliantly in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. But from the start, in the dedication - "for Deborah Warner, who lifted the weight" - she hints that this new book is written with a new kind of freedom.

When Winterson finished The Power Book in 2000, she realised it marked the conclusion of one cycle of work, but had stalled in trying to find a new direction. Warner, an acclaimed theatre director, had suggested she write an adaptation of it for the stage. The idea struck a chord. After all, the theatre had been her first love, from which Oranges had taken her away for two full decades.

"In that time, you do get some weight in the world," she explains. "You become known as a particular kind of writer. To put that down, leave it behind, and say, 'No, I'll be something else now,' was liberating."

A newspaper profile once summed her up in three words: "never knowingly lukewarm". As journalistic shorthand goes, it's accurate enough. "My work is my life," she says simply. "If anything about it is wrong or compromised, then everything is wrong or compromised. It doesn't matter if the roof is falling in or if the bailiffs are at the door, as long as I'm at my desk doing good work, I'm happy."

She brings all that passion into her new story. She genuinely believes that myths matter, "that people need stories bigger than their own lives, that connect us both to the past and to the bigger human picture". Because of that, her own writing has always found room for "cover versions" of myths and legends, for reworked stories that add range - emotional, historical - to whatever she dreams up in her writer's shed in deepest Oxfordshire.

But Weight is also lighter than you might expect, laced with a ready wit and a deliciously dreamy hope. When Atlas finally lays down his burden, not only is he accompanied by Laika, the sputnik dog the Russians sent into the heavens to die, but the world carries on spinning regardless.

And Winterson? She seems far mellower, more content. Maybe she's laid down a burden too. She never liked being a lesbian figurehead, and now she doesn't need to be anymore: we've all moved on too.

But she still preaches, probably always will, against cynicism and for art, against small lives and for myths. "I've been avoiding the gospel tent for years," she laughs, "but I seem to find myself back there by accident. Perhaps I just have to accept it."

A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, The Penelopeiad, by Margaret Atwood, and Weight, by Jeanette Winterson, are all published by Canongate, priced 12. A boxed set of all three is available, priced 35. Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong and Richard Holloway will be talking about myths at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, on Monday. Tickets are 7, tel: 0870 220 1116.