"A Thousand Ships" by Natalie Haynes (2019)

 **The stories that The Iliad and similar epics left out.  The stories of the women of the war**

Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung.

I have sung of armies and I have sung of men.

I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies.

I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain.

I have sung of life after death. 

And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?

And so here we are, hearing stories that have gone untold for millennia--the stories of the women of the Trojan War.  This book is, simply put, a masterpiece

The framing device for the novel is the muse Calliope singing for an poet who is never named (a certain poet never actually mentions Calliope by name in The Iliad.  I imagine her not naming him in this novel is her way of getting back).  But, she informs him, she will be telling him the full story, the real story, the story that gets left out of other tellings of this myth

We start, however, with Troy on fire.  Though we will go backward in time, this is where we know the story will eventually end, so it's fitting that we start there.  Natalie Haynes knows that we know how this story ends--she is by no means trying to write a standalone novel, she is assuming that the reader has knowledge of the Iliad, or at least access to wikipedia.  What Haynes is doing, however, is filling in the gaps.  She can't change the ending for these women, but she can let them tell their stories

The first chapter is told from the perspective of Creusa, husband of Aenas.  In fact, Creusa is not even present in The Iliad, but we know of her from other accounts of the Trojan War such as Virgil's Aeneid.  In this chapter, she realizes that the war has been (just when they thought they had won!) and is attempting to flee.  She is afraid, and she is determined . . . and she is "dead long before dawn"

We only get one chapter of Creusa, but that's the whole point.  Even if she died, that doesn't mean her story, with its quiet dignity as her world burns around her, isn't worth telling.  And that's what much of this book is--the stories, often only a single chapter, of these women

We get to read about Chryseis, whose mother passed away leaving her without a female role model, taking inspiration from Briseis's poise:  "She did not cry out, and felt sure that Briseis was impressed with her self-control. If a woman who had lost so much could remain calm, Chryseis could too."

We get to read about Laodamia, her pain at the loss of her love:  "She did not know – until the messenger arrived with the awful news – that her husband was such a fine warrior. If asked, she would have said that he was, of course. But if asked, she would have said, with equal pride, that he might fly. It was no consolation to her to find out that her husband was brave and skilled with both spear and sword. She would have preferred it if he had sat quivering behind a couch, refusing the call to fight. Who could love a coward, she had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse."

We get to read about Iphigenia, the joy she has as a young woman ready to venture out into the world.  We get to see the moment when she is betrayed and sacrificed, the moment she embraces with "perfect clarity of thought, even as her senses blurred"

Others women, however, do get much more screentime.  Hecabe gets much of her story told, many of the gods appear multiple times.  And Cassandra, oh Cassandra.  My very favorite Greek myth, my very favorite Greek heroine.  Man, Apollo is a dick, but wow what a gloriously perfect punishment he devised for her crime of ::checks notes:: not having sex with him, yeah, that checks out.  Cursed to see the future--and not just the future, but the very worst of the future, the death and the destruction and the pain--but have no one believe her warnings:

‘Could this have been avoided?’ she asked her mother. ‘Did Troy have to fall? Was there no point when we could have been saved?’ 

Cassandra’s shoulders quivered with the effort of not screaming. She shook with the force of her desire to shout that she had told them a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times. And that none of them had listened, not once, not for a heartbeat. They didn’t hear, they couldn’t see, and yet she could see nothing but the future, all the time, forever. Well, not forever. She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.

No for real.  Apollo is a dick.  I'm glad that at least in some other versions, Cassandra got a bit of revenge.  Hit him where it hurts, girl

And so, we run through this well-trod tale and find it anew.  Don't think that the male characters are absent.  Not at all!  However, we get to see them in a very different light--which is to say, we get to see them through the eyes of the women in their lives

We see Agamemnon through the eyes of Chryseis, the priest's daughter he takes with the intention of making her his bed-slave.  Not caring for his throne or the power he wields, he sees him as the vain, cowardly, weak man he really is:

Chryseis’ only first-hand experience of living with a man was with her father. And although she had often thought him cold and inflexible, she now realized that he was also a strong, principled man who did not shirk his responsibilities. 

Agamemnon, she could see, was not. He spent a great deal of time telling everyone about his unparalleled importance, but he rarely wished to make the choices that a king must. How such a weak and petty man had risen to such a position of authority, she had wondered more than once. She had concluded that the Greeks’ selfishness was the cause: every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not what he did. Chryseis contrasted the Argive king with her father, who would never permit such shallowness in himself or his daughter. So although she was afraid of Agamemnon’s pawing hands and his vicious temper, she found herself feeling oddly superior to the man who now owned her.

We see Achilles, the great Achilles, from many different perspectives--though almost always off-screen, talked about but never present.  Because his story has been told, this book isn't about him.  But we see him discussed almost as a supernatural force by the people of Troy, a lion who kills simply because it is his nature.  The most poignant description however comes from the chapter in which we hear the story of Thetis, his mother:

Through nine long years Achilles had stayed safe. The list of his dead grew longer and more glorious, but he remained unhurt. She had let a brief moment of hope flare up when Achilles withdrew himself from battle in the tenth year of the war, some trivial dispute over a mortal girl. But whenever he asked for her advice, she could not refuse to tell him. She left the warm dark sea and told her son what she had always known: that he must choose between a long life and brief renown, or a short life and eternal glory. Only half of him was a god, after all. He could not have both. 

Paris is largely absent from the narrative, which is frankly more or less what he deserves.  To be honest, the women of Troy don't respect him any more than the men do.  But there are two chapters in which we see him described in detail by those who know him.  One is from the perspective of Oenone, his first wife whom he abandoned for Helen.  She is literally left out of Homer's telling of the war, which seems like all kinds of bullshit.  Don't worry, she gets to tell her story here, and honestly I don't want to spoil it

But the most interesting perspective of Paris comes from Helen herself--she's largely absent from this novel, the in-universe reason given by Calliope ("I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves)"), the real-world reason probably because Haynes decided her story would overshadow the others.  But the scene in which she talks to Hecabe, Paris's mother, is one of the best of the whole book:

‘So why do you single me out for blame?’ Helen asked. ‘Paris came to me, remember? He came to Sparta, and to the palace of Menelaus, for one purpose only: to seduce me.’ 

‘And your crime was to be seduced.’ 

‘Yes,’ Helen sighed. ‘That was my crime. To give your handsome son everything he asked for, like everyone else did, because he was pretty and sweet and he enjoyed it so much.’ 

Hecabe was silenced by the truth. She had indulged Paris as a young man, because he was so easily pleased, his delicate face so ready to break into a smile. Her other sons had worked harder and been more dutiful, but she had loved Paris like a pet. No one could resist him, and so he was always spoiled. Had Priam even questioned him, when he announced that he needed a ship to sail to Greece? Had anyone asked him where he was going or why? Blood suffused her creased cheeks: she knew that no one had. They had recoiled when he arrived back in Troy with Helen, and his hazy smile – she would never forget it – had morphed into a petulant confusion. 

Paris was perplexed that his family did not rush to welcome him and his new wife home. He was less perplexed when the Greek fleet arrived in the bay, but still seemed to believe that the Trojans were withholding their approval from some malicious cause rather than a genuine horror at his behaviour and its consequences. Even as he watched his brothers, friends and neighbours fight and die in a war he had begun, he never offered an apology, never claimed responsibility. For Paris, the problem was not his behaviour but Menelaus’ reaction which was, to him, entirely inexplicable. Everyone had always allowed him, encouraged him even, to take whatever he wanted. He had done that, and then suddenly there was a war.

Even the male characters are defined, in this novel, not by their own actions but by their relationship with the women around them.  If that seems unfair, well, it's how the vast majority of female characters are treated in uhhh most works of fiction.  And often nonfiction.  So, we see Agamemnon as a man disdained by even his slaves; we see Achilles as a man loved by his mother who cannot protect him; we see Paris as a man spoiled by his mother and what he became because of that

Oh, and then there's Odysseus.  He shows up occasionally in many chapters, the cunning strategist behind the Greek army.  But mostly, we get to see him through the truly, truly laugh-out-loud hilarious letters penned by Penelope, waiting patiently back in Ithica

The joke, as it were, is that she regularly receives bards who are telling the story of Odysseus's circuitous trip home, and she has less and less patience ("really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas?") every new adventure she hears of.  The ire absolutely dripping from her words is truly magnificent:

But honestly, Odysseus, did you believe this journey was necessary? You were already so far from home (I am not entirely sure where Aeaea, Circe’s island, is situated, but probably not as close to the edge of the earth as I would hope)? And then to sail to the river that circles the world in perpetual darkness? I think it is fair to consider this one of your more unusual choices.

But I am thinking like a stranger, like one of the bards who sings your story. You have not sailed to the place of perpetual night in spite of the danger, have you? You have done so because of it. I know you, Odysseus. There is little you would enjoy more than the chance to boast that you had taken your ship to the end of the world and back again. What a fantastic story, people would say. And you would demur, no, anyone would have done the same thing in your position. Except, somehow, no one else is ever in your position, are they?

Honestly, Penelope's chapters might have been my favorite of the whole book.  The whole of the Odyssey, sarcastically recounted by the woman back home waiting for him ("Calypso seems to have been the perfect hostess, so long as you overlook the part where you are – and it seems almost quaint that I still remember this – my husband, and not hers."), was just fantastic

And yet, as easy as it would have been to rest on simply that fun and unique premise, Haynes didn't.  Because as mentioned above, we know how these stories all end.  Haynes didn't have the power to rewrite them.  And so, instead, she chose to think about what kind of woman would wait twenty years for Odysseus to come home.  And then she tells the story of that woman:

Telemachus’ best hope is that I marry one of these young, handsome, greedy men, and thus reduce the threat he poses to them. Is that what you would want, Odysseus, if you were alive? I cannot pretend I haven’t considered it. They are so very, very young. And I am not. The thought of their hard, youthful flesh is a tempting one. It’s not as if you have been faithful, after all. Your infidelities are the subject of song all over Achaea and beyond. There are children learning to play the lyre who can sing of your other women. And nymphs. And goddesses. 

You have humiliated me, and I am sorely tempted to return the favour. A young man would be delicious. And grateful. But, oh, Odysseus, they are all so stupid. I cannot abide it. I would rather my clever old husband came home than set myself up with a witless young one. What would we ever talk about? Although I suppose they would not want to talk much. Young men so rarely do.

And really, that sums up the whole book.  At every turn, Haynes breathes life and depth into women who were sometimes given only a line or two in other versions.  And each woman is distinct, from Penelope's pragmatism to Clytemnestra's simmering anger to Laodamia's romance to Briseis's grace and poise

I loved this book because, once you read it, you realize just how necessary it is that this book exists.  A lot like Valente's equally wonderful "Refrigerator Monologues" which tackles our modern mythologies (superhero comics) this book means that you can never read the original in quite the same way.  It does not seek to overwrite or correct The Iliad.  That story has been told.  Once you read this book, it's hard to look at The Iliad as anything more than half a tale.  Because "A Thousand Ships" is the other, equally necessary half

I loved this book

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.