A Short History of Myth
by Karen Armstrong
Canongate £12.00, 159 pages

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
by Margaret Atwood
Canongate £12.00, 199 pages

Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson
Canongate £12.00, 151 pages

The idea behind the Pocket Canons series, launched in the late 1990s by independent Edinburgh-based publisher Canongate, was simple: take each of the Bible’s individual books; add an introduction by a widely recognised commentator (scientist Steven Rose on Genesis, novelist Louis de Bernieres on The Book of Job, singer Nick Cave on Mark); throw in a sharp, instantly recognisable design for the entire collection. Beyond repackaging scripture, the series dispelled the whiff of incense by allowing readers to approach the Bible’s distinct sections as works of literature. The enterprise was an unqualified success.

Canongate has now started another project that will have rival publishers wondering why they didn’t think of it themselves. Some of the world’s finest writers have been invited to choose a myth of antiquity and render it in their own fashion. The handsomely designed Myths Series was launched simultaneously by Canongate and 33 other publishers around the globe this month. Readers can expect versions of myths as retold by Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Brazil’s Milton Hatoum, Israel’s David Grossman, Russia’s Victor Pelevin, China’s Su Tong, Japan’s Natsuo Kirino and the US’s Donna Tartt. The prospect is mouth-watering.

In the collection’s first volume, A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong provides the background for the feast of storytelling that will follow. A former nun who penned a memoir of her cloistered life, wrote about Islam and Buddha, and published histories of God and of Jerusalem, she is well placed to discuss mankind’s attempts to make sense of our world. “Human beings have always been mythmakers,” she begins. “We are meaning-seeking creatures.”

Myths, she explains, are rooted in humans’ fear of death. They are usually inseparable from ritual. They are not stories told for their own sake, but to show us how to behave. A myth is a lasting hypothesis about man’s environment, and man’s place within it. A myth is true because it is effective as an explanation, “not because it gives us factual information”.

Although modern scientific thinking has thrown mythical thinking into disrepute, Armstrong argues, both modes of thought share the same indispensable attribute: imagination. “Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology... is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.” Nor should myths be considered essentially religious. “Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience... When people spoke of the divine, they were usually talking about an aspect of the mundane.”

Armstrong traces the origins of myth-making to the Palaeolithic period (20,000-8,000BC), when human beings “completed their biological evolution” and discovered that “a longing for transcendence was built into their condition”. Hunters learned to rely on logical skills to survive, but needed myths and rituals to reconcile themselves to the uneasiness caused by the need to kill animals.

The Neolithic period (c. 8,000-4,000BC) ushered in an agricultural revolution that changed the focus of mythmaking: gone were the sky gods and animal spirits, usurped by mother goddesses who determined the earth’s fertility. With the emergence of early civilisations and the development of urban life, the gods began to recede.

Armstrong’s potted history of the mythical imagination is plainly told and forcefully argued. Its take on myths is anthropological rather than literary, so it feels slightly out of place in the series, but is valuable to those wishing to inquire further into the origin of the stories.

“A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently,” Armstrong concludes. “If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.”

Few novelists are better suited to adopt the priestly role of myth-spinner than Margaret Atwood, whose The Penelopiad is an adaptation of The Odyssey as recounted by the hero’s long-suffering wife.

The story is well known: Odysseus, king of Ithaca, goes off to the Trojan wars. He spends 10 years fighting and the next 10 trying to get home, while his faithful Penelope raises their son Telemachus and fends off ambitious suitors. Odysseus finally returns and reclaims his throne, but not before slaying the would-be usurpers and a dozen of Penelope’s handmaids who, it appears, conspired with them.

From an eternal afterlife, Penelope rails against the commonly accepted version of the tale. “And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners.”

So she tells the story herself - of her birth and childhood, the relationship with her unbearable cousin Helen of Troy, her marriage to Odysseus (who secretly lusted after Helen) and of her long wait, amid unsettling reports from rumour-mongers. “[Odysseus had] made his men put wax in their ears, said one, while sailing past the alluring Sirens - half-bird, half-woman - who enticed men to their island and ate them, though he’d tied himself to the mast so he could listen to their irresistible singing without jumping overboard. No, said another, it was a high-class Sicilian knocking shop - the courtesans there were known for their musical talents and their fancy feathered outfits.”

In counterpoint to her story are “chorus lines” performed by the 12 dead maids in the form of a ballad, a love song, a short play, a court hearing and even an anthropology lecture. The maids, who blame Penelope for their deaths, do not hesitate to confirm some of the “slanderous gossip” regarding her less-than-exemplary conduct: “While you your famous loom claimed to be threading/ In fact you were at work within the bedding!”

Atwood’s line in bone-dry humour has found an exemplary voice in Penelope. It is the voice of an intelligent woman who knows better than to exhibit her intelligence. “It’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness,” she warns.

There are more barbs against men’s intolerance of clever women in Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles. Like The Penelopiad, it is filled with wisdom and humour. But where Atwood has gone for deadpan wit, Winterson has opted for poetics. Weight is rich in imagery, lush with her trademark moving, meditative flourishes.

On the surface of things, Weight tells how Atlas, punished for rebelling against the gods, is sentenced to bear the weight of the cosmos; how Heracles, on a mission to collect the golden apples from the Hesperides’ garden, persuades Atlas to do it for him while he, Heracles, carries the load; and how he tricks Atlas back into his never-ending, back-bending task.

Yet Winterson has made it a story about herself, too. Halfway through her tale, she lapses into autobiography: “When I was born my mother gave me away to a stranger.

I had no say in that. It was her decision, my fate. Later, my adopted mother rejected me too. And told me I was none of her, which was true. Having no one to carry me, I learned to carry myself. My girlfriend says I have an Atlas complex.” Here is a vivid illustration of why myths endure - and why this remarkable series matters. Myths are not about gods. They are about us all.