Annabel Lyon brings Aristotle to life in 'The Golden Mean'

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by: Tyrone.Warner
Date: 11/3/2009 4:22:00 PM ET

In telling the story of philosopher Aristotle and his most important pupil, Alexander the Great, Annabel Lyon re-imagines the legendary philosopher in a revolutionary new way.

• Click here to read an excerpt from "The Golden Mean"

Citing Aristotle’s endless influence on modern culture, Giller prize nominee Annabel Lyon hopes readers of her book, “The Golden Mean,” will take away a newfound appreciation for the man and his work.

“He’s the father of logic and that’s where computer science comes from! He was the father of medicine when he was one of the first people to do dissection. We go to the theatre to watch a Hollywood blockbuster, which is structured in three acts. Who wrote about that? He did,” says Lyon.

“There’s so much still alive in our culture that go back to him, but those threads are so deeply buried that nobody knows that anymore. I wanted to bring him back into popular knowledge; I wanted people to know who he is.”

“The Golden Mean” is Lyon’s first novel. Her first short story collection, “Oxygen” was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Award, and her second collection, “The Best Thing for You,” was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction and the City of Vancouver Book Award.

The author currently calls New Westminster, B.C., home, and lives there with her husband and two children.

Before earning a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, Lyon was a philosophy student at Simon Fraser University, where she first cultivated her appreciation of Aristotle.

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Lyon returned to her Aristotle texts to try and make sense of the world events that followed. In the process of doing that, she came upon an idea.

“I read his little bio about Aristotle in one of these books, and because I am a fiction writer, I thought, ‘If I were to write a novel about him, how would I go about doing that? It wasn’t like I was struck by lightning and I thought I should write this novel,” says Lyon.

“It was more deliberate and conscious and rational. When I first started working on it, I sketched an outline, and I did actually work from that outline from beginning to end, I had almost storyboarded it like a screenwriter.”

In writing “The Golden Mean,” Lyon discovered that she needed to adapt her short story style into the longer form.

“Novels are a whole different beast. I couldn’t spend as long fiddling around with terribly beautiful sentences, spending forever editing one paragraph. I had to think in terms of a much longer line, much more in terms of plotting and character, which was great for me.”

Besides tackling her first novel, Lyon accepted that she had an even bigger task in store: making Aristotle feel relevant and contemporary for today’s readers.

“I wanted to make it accessible, I wanted to make it cinematic, I wanted it to resonate with our culture now,” says Lyon. “That’s why in my version of Alexander, I have him suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. I learned about people coming back from Iraq, and it felt right and real to me… I wanted these characters to be engaged with our time.”

Despite all of Aristotle’s accomplishments, Lyon doesn’t want to present a mythologized view of the philosopher, and instead wanted to present a real person in her book. That meant facing head-on Aristotle’s antiquated attitudes towards women.

“For all that I hugely admire his intellect, if I sat down with him now, like at a dinner table, I’d probably want to throttle him! He would look at me as being less intelligent, not a citizen and shouldn’t be voting, made to serve the male of the species, all that kind of stuff,” says Lyon.

“I saw I could work around that in two ways: I could massage it, pretend that it’s not a part of who he is, or show him, warts and pimples and all. I had to include this as part of his character. That was hard. It was hard to create a real character that was admirable in many ways, but had these objectionable parts of his personality. It was a big struggle.”

But all of that effort has paid off for Lyon; not only has she been shortlisted for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize, she’s also been shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Prize.

“To be perfectly honest, it is overwhelming. I wouldn’t wish any of it away, but now I’m suddenly much busier this fall than I thought I would be. I’m a very shy person to start with, so now there’s a lot of TV, photographs and that sort of thing. I never anticipated anything like this could have happened with the book. It’s bizarre,” says Lyon.

Despite the growing buzz about her book and her multiple nominations; motherhood is keeping this author grounded.

“I’ve got two toddlers, so I still have to get up in the morning, feed them and send them off to school. They have no idea what’s going on, so that part of my life hasn’t changed. I don’t think I’ll know how things have changed until the dust settles.”

For those who enjoyed reading “The Golden Mean,” Lyon has been blogging at annabellyon.blogspot.com over the past year, providing background for the text and more.

While the author admits she was “hugely resentful” when her publisher asked her to blog, she discovered the process was enjoyable.

“I think it can be a really interesting companion to the book, depending on the kind of book. With historical fiction, it’s really well suited to that, because you do so much research and a blog is a great place to include the fascinating bits and pieces that you couldn’t quite fit into the novel.”

With that said, don’t expect a blog for Lyon’s next novel: the notoriously shy writer says she’s very private and won’t be sharing any details until the next book is finished.

The 2009 Scotiabank Giller prize will be awarded on Tuesday, November 10, in a gala ceremony in Toronto.