“They were human beings”: Giller-nominated author Colin McAdam says we can learn a lot from ancient Greeks

It’s a magical tale rooted 2000 years in the past, a Greek pastoral romance about two young lovers who survive all manner of fearful ordeals to reach true fulfilment.

Daphnis and Chloe has endured through the centuries, hailed by some academics as the first true example of the novel form. But what on earth does it to have to do with a contemporary world of biker gangs and human trafficking?

It’s a question that veteran Canadian novelist Colin McAdam is prepared to deal with. After all his new book, also titled Daphnis and Chloe, is an audacious retelling of a classic literary work, at times awash in sex and violence yet fuelled by the original’s message that young love can prevail.

McAdam’s publishers have cited his version as a blending of Harlequin fiction with the blood-soaked Quentin Tarantino-scripted film, True Romance. So does this shortchange it as no more than a work of slick exploitation? Not according to the Giller people who longlisted Daphnis and Chloe for Canada’s most prestigious literary award.

Biblioasis

McAdam, a classic Greek scholar, wanted to deliver a fun read with this book, but it’s anchored to his belief that the ancient world still has much to teach present-day society. He cites the huge success of Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey.

“They were human beings — like us,” he says from his home in West Quebec. “I think we are in a moment where there is such rapid change that people just want to say — let’s slow down and consider things more deeply, the things that we really do care about. During revolutionary times people look toward ancient wisdom, whatever it may be. They look at what worked and what didn’t in the past, and why. They look at the stories that sort of got us to where we are.”

There are no goatherds or shepherdesses, no rustic adversaries or rampaging pirates in McAdam’s update of Longus’s ancient story. Instead there is an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, its owners two Greek immigrants, Frank and Charlie. Frank brings home an abandoned baby, and he and his wife name him Daphnis. Chloe is the child Charlie and his wife adopt after she is discovered in an abandoned van. The children grow up together and fall in love only to have their lives endangered by predatory forces who plunge these youngsters into a dark world of illegal drugs and sex slavery.

McAdam notes that the original suggests a yearning for the past and that Longus himself did not live in the pastoral world of his story.

“He was writing at the peak of the Roman empire. Roads were everywhere, bureaucracy was everywhere, there were issues of class, people were more literate and technology was changing the world. This has obvious parallels with various times in human history, and certainly with now. Back then it was shepherdesses and goatherds. So why not now focus on the internal combustion engine, and why not set it in a garage and make this a sort of working-class love story?”

He doesn’t consider the parallel that far-fetched.

“The original was part of a tradition — ancient Greek and Roman stories that did have a pretty direct influence on Harlequin romances. They were based on stories of lower-class culture — foundlings, crazy adventures, happy endings, revelations where the poor people were actually high-born, and they get married … good old-fashioned Harlequin romance stuff.”

McAdam had gone through a low period professionally when he started work on Daphnis And Chloe. His 2022 novel, Black Dove had suffered depressingly low sales despite rave reviews. “I felt it was like the end of my career,” he remembers. “And the whole world seemed to be in a dark place. You reach a point where you think — why the struggle, what’s the point of it all?”

Then he told himself to “buck up” — to get a grip on himself, to “try writing for the sake of writing.” And then he thought of reworking Daphnis And Chloe, an old favourite.

“I loved the book and others in that tradition. It was super fun for me to read as a young man, surprisingly funny and charming, a surprising rumination on love at its centre.”

So a 2000-year-old Greek fable rejuvenated him creatively. “I wanted to reconnect with why I became a writer in the first place … I couldn’t wait to get up and write — and that was a feeling I hadn’t had for a very long time. My version has a fair amount of darkness in the middle, but there is light and the end and getting toward that light was a beautiful process.”

McAdam realizes now that he was responding to today’s digital culture, its “lack of wonder” and spawning of “a rather bland, undifferentiated, fearful world.” But he was also fulfilling a personal need. “In all honesty, for me it was an important spiritual act to honour my own thoughts and experiences of love, and to find a way of indulging my own love of writing as a creative act.”