With celebrations for Purcell's 350th birthday anniversary and several productions of Dido and Aeneas taking place, this is Dido's year. Adele Geras's Dido is a novelisation for young adults of the great tragic love story, in which she has combined the pre-Virgil myths and the version in the Aeneid with an additional twist that is all her own. She brings to it the accessibility, warmth and immediacy that she brought to Troy and Ithaka, and again the dialogue is modern. The Dido story has all the dramatic ingredients to appeal to adolescent girls, and Geras knows this: sexual passion, rejection, and dying for love - or want of it.
According to Virgil's version, Dido, founder and queen of Carthage, falls in love with the Trojan leader Aeneas after he is shipwrecked on her shore, only to be abandoned by him when he learns from Jupiter that his destiny is to found a great dynasty and the city of Rome. Mad with grief at his rejection, Dido first curses him and the nation he is to found, then throws herself on to a funeral pyre. Geras has vividly fleshed out the bones of this slight story. In her novel Dido has a maid, sixteen year-old Elissa. Elissa was Dido's original name: an interesting psychological slant, given that Elissa, too, falls in love with Aeneas.
The action of the novel takes place on the fateful night of Dido's suicide and is interspersed with flashbacks from the viewpoints of four players in the drama: Elissa; Iopas, the court singer-poet, who is to play a significant part in events; Anna, Dido's devoted sister (and the only 'real' character among them), who longs for love herself and is infatuated with Iopas; Cubby, a slightly backward kitchen boy (these last two characters are particularly sympathetically drawn). All of them suffer for love, while the meddling, manipulating gods quarrel over them and appear to the human characters as if figments of a dream.
There is a good deal of weeping, as one might expect, but for Elissa the novel ends on a note of hope. However, Dido's story is not yet over, nor will it ever be: she has found a way to 'make the story mine'. The last scene works wonderfully.