Geryon is one of those unfortunate figures in Greek mythology who possesses several bodies, a pair of wings, a magnificent herd of cattle and still somehow manages to become a footnote in somebody else’s story. He lives at the western edge of the world; Herakles, having already endured a fairly exhausting succession of labours, is instructed to fetch his cattle; there is some resistance, quite understandably, since Geryon has not been consulted about any of this, and presently Herakles kills him and drives the herd away. The hero moves on. Geryon, having fulfilled the ancient and largely thankless office of being difficult to defeat, does not.

Stesichorus seems to have found this arrangement a little unsatisfactory too. His Geryoneis, composed centuries after Homer and now surviving only in fragments, allowed Geryon rather more room to exist before Herakles arrived to finish the business. His mother worries about him. Geryon gets some lines. There are flashes of a monster beginning to look like somebody whose death might be unfortunate for reasons extending beyond the inconvenience of losing several excellent cattle.

When Carson published Autobiography of Red in 1998, she took those fragments and did something both recognisable and singular with them. Geryon remains red, remains winged and remains, in some sense, monstrous. Carson has no intention of taking away the embarrassing mythological furniture merely because buses and cameras have now entered the story. He is also a boy who loves his mother, takes photographs, suffers terribly at the hands of his brother, meets Herakles at a bus station and falls in love with him with the appalling, wholehearted lack of proportion available chiefly to the young, who have not yet learnt that another person may occupy eighty per cent of your thoughts while you occupy perhaps twelve per cent of theirs.

Yesterday Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the coming weeks there will be introductions for bewildered new readers, lists of the five Carson books one absolutely must begin with, explanations of what a verse novel is, solemn assurances that the difficult bits are worth persisting through. Autobiography of Red will almost certainly appear near the top of these lists because it has a story one can explain without first drawing a diagram.

The usual shorthand says that Carson takes the myth of Geryon and Herakles and turns it into a queer love story, which is true enough and also leaves out nearly everything I find most interesting about the book. We are very comfortable with myth retellings now. The ancient world has become one of contemporary publishing’s most dependable store cupboards, and whenever fiction requires another story somebody opens the door and finds a neglected woman, a monster, a wife with grievances, a daughter who was sacrificed without proper consultation or some minor figure who was given three lines and an unpleasant death in the original. Circe has spoken, Penelope has spoken, Clytemnestra has spoken several times and, considering her domestic circumstances, can hardly be blamed for having a great deal to say.

I kept expecting, when I first read Autobiography of Red, that Carson would eventually translate his monsterhood into something tidier. We think the monsterhood would prove to be merely the cruel name given to an ordinary boy by people who did not understand him, and by the end everything strange about Geryon could be filed under some modern psychological heading and discussed without embarrassment. Instead his mother helps him with his wings, and there is something so matter-of-fact about this that it moves me more than any grand reclamation of monstrosity probably could. Geryon is her child, he has wings, and one manages.

The same is true of Herakles, who might have been made much easier to dislike. He is beautiful, careless, charming, capable of tenderness and possessed of the particular selfishness that flourishes very well in people who are used to being loved. Geryon falls for him anyway, which feels entirely right. Literature would be much much thinner if people confined themselves to falling in love only after conducting a sensible assessment of character.

This is why I hesitate over the word modernisation whenever people use it for Carson. She seems less interested in renovation than in coexistence. Stesichorus and cameras, Herakles and bus stations, Heidegger, volcanoes and adolescent longing all occupy the same book.

Possibly this is because Carson knows the ancient material too well to be overawed by it. There is a kind of reverence produced by distance which makes the classics feel as though they ought to be approached with care, preferably after somebody has explained the historical context. Carson has spent her life translating and teaching Greek, reading fragments, worrying at words whose meanings have been worried at by scholars for centuries, and she seems to have emerged from all this intimacy with a kind of freedom. Her scholarship wanders into the creative work freely: she invents interviews, rearranges fragments, borrows the furniture of academic commentary and leaves it in odd places.

Our own retellings have developed conventions, and one of the strongest is correction. The old story failed to listen to somebody, so the new story listens; the ancient hero behaved appallingly, so the modern novel shifts its sympathies towards whoever had the misfortune to be on the receiving end of that behaviour. There is a faintly prosecutorial air in all this.

I think this is where the book becomes most interesting to me, because contemporary fiction has become terribly fond of relatability, a word which increasingly makes me want to hide the nearest interesting character before somebody decides to improve them. Ancient figures become ambitious in familiar ways, traumatised in familiar ways, rebellious in familiar ways, and eventually somebody declares them timeless. There is something to be said in favour of leaving a little distance intact.

Geryon is emotionally recognisable enough to hurt us and strange enough never to collapse entirely into our own image. Sympathy does not require perfect resemblance, and literature would be a rather impoverished business if it did. One of its pleasures is precisely the chance to care about somebody whose mind, body, world or moral arrangements do not match our own, and to remain with that difference instead of immediately turning it into a lesson.

The Nobel will now send a great many new readers towards Carson, including some who have avoided her because she sounded difficult and others who will promptly become slightly proprietary about having loved her first. I hope they come without expecting an obedient classicist who will explain Greece to them politely.

Geryon once existed at the edge of Herakles’ story, red and extraordinary and alive for approximately as long as the hero required an obstacle. Stesichorus paused beside him. Carson stayed longer, long enough for the monster to acquire a mother, a camera, a disastrous first love, several countries, several kinds of sorrow and enough time for being killed to cease being the most interesting thing that ever happened to him.

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Written by Nishat Hossain, a writer and reader interested in classics, contemporary fiction, reading culture, and the ways through which old stories continue to shape the present.