“He was the author of his own downfall” is a phrase rarely used to mean that self-destruction was the destructee’s intention. Rather we regard someone who is, synonymously “hoist with his own petard”, as being little more than an obvious victim of irony. “Irony” and “author” are both literary terms. There was, though, a time when life was lived, not written; indeed, human society had no history because it had no way to write its story. Those times were mythic and legendary. Those myths were great and long lasting – they lasted long enough to become the first subjects of tragedy performed in amphitheatres. They lasted long enough to make scientists examine them for templates of human folly. They lasted long enough to become best sellers in paperback, falling into the hands of conscripts such as Brian Aldiss on his troopship back from the orient to Britain.

        Yet those myths never lost their complexity.

        In Haruki Murakami’s KAFKA ON THE SHORE, his protagonist, the eponymous Kafka, is threatened today with the fate of Oedipus – that he would murder his father – and by his own efforts escapes it. Brian Aldiss takes us back to Bronze Age Thebes, where no matter how a novelist may rework the tale, Oedipus cannot escape his fate. Nevertheless, the working out of his destiny requires others – Oedipus, remember, would kill his father, marry his mother; on the way he becomes king of Thebes and acquires subjects. He has a relationship with all these. On the other hand, these characters all have personalities, interior lives and reasons, fallible memories, and, Brian Aldiss, has realised, motives, obvious or ulterior.

        “Oedipus” means swollen footed (as in oedema and podiatrist) because as a baby he had been exposed on a hillside, staked through the feet, though he must have been rescued before he became paraplegic. Nevertheless, the woman who shares his bedroom many years later has to be aware that men of his age with crippled feet are few and far between – Jocasta, wife of the late king of Thebes, taken by Oedipus in unintentional combat, must have realised this, Aldiss argues. The guilt is not necessarily all the new king’s: Jocasta, mother and wife, could have spoken and stopped the prediction coming true, but did not. She and the reasons for her silence sit at the heart of this book.

        A modern novelist can stop and interpolate – Murakami throws in references to Goethe, Jung, the Czech Kafka. A novelist who wishes to be true to the past, though, must recognise other realities and accept other truths. Oedipus, on his way, solved the riddle of the Sphinx, and now the Sphinx has followed Oedipus to town and lives in the palace, an unwelcome guest. The Furies hang over the city ever pouncing, and Semele the witch, grandmother of Jocasta, casts spells summoning the dead. One age is ending, though, and another beginning and Semele’s magic brings a figure from the future, not the past, Sophocles, who recognises these individuals only as the name of characters in his plays, of varying importance to the production. Jocasta, her children and husband, might be no more than potential literary subjects, unable to be the authors of their own fate, subject to the whims of their writers. If we were no more than flies to the gods, we might be no more than pawns to a tragedian, but in a leaping coda, “Antigone”, Aldiss covers both Jocasta’s next generation and our own time, linked by horror, but also joined by the intention to fight on.

        It is over a century since the reality of the “Oedipus complex” was first put forward, yet the reality of the Sphinx also encountered by Oedipus seems never to have been propounded before now. Brian Aldiss has suggested alternate realities, in THE MALACIA TAPESTRY and the HELLICONIA series, and he unbound both Frankenstein and Dracula from their fictions. While JOCASTA arrives even as Murakami has also rediscovered Oedipus, that simultaneous appearance also allows readers to contrast the two, identifying their different, desirable originalities – you may find that Aldiss is the stronger. Proclaim it.