Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody is his first novel in a decade. TheLife of Pi (2001) is his most famous and most beloved work. In fact, even though Martel has written three other novels, The Life of Pi continues to tower over them and shape expectations of the novelist — as it does of Son of Nobody as well. Yet in its very first pages, the narrative seems performative more than felt, and that sense never goes away.The protagonist of Son of Nobody is Harlow Donne, a Canadian Ph.D scholar who receives a lucrative fellowship to spend a year at Oxford, leaving behind an unhappy wife, Gail, and their young daughter, Helen. While he is there, Helen becomes unwell. He refuses to return to the family and asks Gail to postpone their engagements because he is, “in the moment”, close to finishing his scholarly work.That work is a translation of what Harlow claims are hitherto undiscovered fragments of the Trojan War narrated by a common Greek soldier named Psoas — “The Psoad”, as Harlow calls it. Martel stages this double life by having the top half of each page carry the verse translation and the bottom half Harlow’s own footnotes, which begin as scholarly annotation and gradually fill with personal recollections and guilt. By the end, his marriage with Gail has collapsed and in the tale’s final pages, Harlow understands at long last that he has failed his family — a revelation fiction has been offering for so long that it illuminates little.The Psoad itself is told from Psoas’s point of view. It recounts what the Trojan War was to its soldiers and commoners rather than to its nobility or the gods, which means bloodshed, loss and ashes of the dead more than a contest between good and evil. The Iliad was much more than that, of course.Men and their choicesThe Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy, oil on canvas by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1760, at the National Gallery, London.