JOHN WISWELL Wearing the Lion. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

His first novel has just won a prestigious Nebula Award; now John Wiswell puts his humorous and humanist spin on the labours of Heracles.

The retelling of tales from Greek mythology is not new – Shakespeare did it, among others. But it feels like there are a lot of retellings, reimaginings and reworkings of Greek mythology doing the rounds at the moment. From Pat Barker’s Women of Troy series, to Madeline Miller’s Circe and Song of Achilles, to various works by authors like Stephen Fry, Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes. And not only in literature but also on the screen. Recently we had Charlie Covell’s very modern take in Kaos, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche playing Odysseus and Penelope in The Return, and next year we will have Christopher Nolan’s star-studded voyage of Odysseus. So to say this is a crowded market in which to pitch a Greek retelling is an understatement.

And yet, if anyone can put their own unique spin on this material it is John Wiswell. His Nebula-winning debut Someone You Can Build a Nest In was a sweetly twisted fractured fairytale told from the perspective of the monster. And in Wearing the Lion he brings much of this sensibility to his retelling of the labours of Heracles (itself done many times, including as a Disney animated musical).

When Wearing the Lion opens it feels very much in the vein of Kaos – a modern rendering of the Greek pantheon, to the point where readers could almost imagine Jeff Goldblum and Janet McTeer reprising their roles as Zeus and Hera. This first section (and half of the book) is narrated by Hera, who is not happy:

There at the rim of our temple stands my dipshit husband. Immense in height, his white beard thicker than brambles. His robe made from the wool of golden lambs is cast away, dangling from one hip. His shoulders block out the sun.

They are on high in Olympos, witnessing the birth of Zeus’s latest child, conceived with a human.

‘Good news, Heaven,’ announces my dipshit husband. ‘I’ve made a new king of the mortals.’ …

‘Bastard!’ I reach for the ivory javelin that a priestess once carried across half the sea to lay at the foot of my temple in Delphi, ready to finally break it in. My aim will be true. I want to get him through both testicles and at least one eye.

Suffice to say Hera is prevented from doing so but does manage to change the prophecy so that the child, Alcides, while blessed with godlike strength, does not become king. But Hera takes against the child:

‘I will not suffer this insult to live. I’ll put fucking snakes in his crib.’

But it turns out that Alcides worships his ‘auntie’ Hera and, almost from the beginning, takes the name Heracles in her honour. Heracles unwittingly turns her plans against her in the other strand of the novel, which is mainly written as prayers from Heracles to Hera:

Dear Auntie Hera

Thank you for the snake friends. They are wiggly. We played a lot. They are sleeping now.

Please send more animal friends. Do you have cats?

This opening sets a particular tone – heightened, satirical, comic. Those who are already familiar with the story will know that it gets dark fairly quickly as Hera drives Heracles mad to the point where he kills his own children. In the original story Heracles then undertakes 12 labours (seemingly impossible tasks) for King Eurystheus. But it is at this point that Wiswell goes well off script, using those 12 tasks as a kind of scaffold for a very different tale.

Heracles is trying to find out who forced him to kill his children. Hera, concerned that he will discover her involvement, contrives to send him on impossible quests to prevent him from learning the truth. And while in the original story Heracles kills a series of undefeatable monsters (including the invincible lion of Nemea, the many-headed hydra and the man-eating Erymanthian boar), in this version Heracles, scarred by the death of his children, befriends them and they join him on his quest:

Do you see as I pull the lion down into my arms, forcing its muzzle against my shoulder? I clutch it by the scruff of the neck, trapping its mouth shut without harming it further. My tears wet its mane, and it tries to bite at me … It’s never wrestled someone who didn’t want to kill it before.

Meanwhile on Olympos, Hera, racked with guilt over the death of Heracles’ children, is finding she has her own family issues to deal with as her children start interfering in the quest and jockeying to take over the throne in Zeus’s unexplained absence.

In Wisell’s hands, the 12 labours of Heracles are completely refashioned to become a delightful found family narrative in the mortal realm, with Heracles as a man sick of violence who just wants to befriend those who are outcast and have people be kind to each other. On Olympos it becomes a godly family drama (with hints of Succession) with Hera desperately trying to right her own wrongs while dealing with a range of ambitious, greedy, powerful but also loyal children.

Overall Wearing the Lion does not work quite as well as Wiswell’s debut, and this could be because he is refashioning existing material rather than creating something new. While Wiswell is in many ways reverential to the text, his approach, which reimagines many well-defined characters of Greek mythology, sometimes strains against the constraints of the original story and the characters he is drawing from.

As with his debut, Wiswell’s characters, including many of the side characters, are delightful and engaging even when they are doing bad things. The narrative is full of humour, sly winks to the source material and more than a little quirkiness. Treated as a piece of interpretation that brings an ancient story to life and gives it a new relevance, rather than a strict retelling, Wearing the Lion is a success.

John Wiswell Wearing the Lion Arcadia Books 2025 PB 384pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He is a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

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Tags: Greek mythology, Hera, Heracles, John | Wiswell, labours of Heracles, Someone You Can Build A Nest In, Zeus