BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Natalie Haynes is well-known to Radio 4 listeners as the bubbly presenter of Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, not to mention a critic on programmes like Front Row and Saturday Review. Having studied Classics at Cambridge and being part of the famous Footlights, it is unsurprising that she was once a stand-up comic and that she now spends much of her professional life promoting the Classics, often humorously. Popular at both comedy and book festivals, Haynes is personable and has a degree of charisma. She has written non-fiction books and essays;  A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize For Fiction in 2020, is Haynes’ third novel, after Amber Fury and Children of Jocasta.

  

I have to be honest and admit that someone bought me this novel. While I do have an interest in classical mythology, I feel that my curiosity has been well satisfied by Stephen Fry’s popular retellings of the most famous myths. The recent plethora of novels based on classical mythology, often from a feminist perspective, has also taken the edge off my interest, not because they are bad books (many are excellent) but simply because I’m growing bored with the gods.

It didn’t help that the first few chapters didn’t really grab me. I found the pace rather slow and the writing a little too over-stuffed. However, I persisted, as I felt I owed it to the friend who had bought the book for me to try to read as much as I could, and I found, as I progressed, that the stories themselves began to grip me. I know these stories already, from school, from books and TV series and films, but Haynes’s novel actually helped me to get all the relationships straight in my head. Ah, Priam’s wife was Hecabe, and Paris, Hector and Polydorus were their sons? Oh, right, the Oenone of Tennyson’s poem was actually Paris’s abandoned wife? And now I understand, Patroclus was Achilles’ best mate (and possible lover) whose death made the arrogant ‘hero’ lose his rag and drag Hector’s body round the walls of Troy? Oh, and Iphigenia was Agamemnon’s tragic daughter?

I’m not sure whether it was simply familiarity with Haynes’s style or whether her writing actually improved, but I began to genuinely enjoy the novel from around Chapter Five. It is structured as a patchwork quilt of female stories which together tell the story of the Trojan War. These stories are not presented chronologically, and sometimes it takes a while for their significance to become clear. The novel jumps from character to character, though there is an ongoing chorus of Trojan Women who appear every so often, and some chapters continue a story begun elsewhere.  Occasional sections are narrated by goddesses or similar supernatural entities, and the existence of the pantheon of deities is treated as an accepted fact by the various women whose stories we hear. This complex structure actually works very well; like a jigsaw puzzle, each story fits into the others and deepens our understanding of the whole. There were stories that were new to me (such as the one about Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior queen; or Chryseis, the teenage daughter of a Trojan priest), and familiar stories that had new life breathed into them. There is no doubt that the feminine perspective makes these classic stories much more accessible and interesting to a female readership, but hopefully Haynes has revealed a new angle for male readers too.

I would suggest that you will get the most from this novel if you already have at least a sketchy knowledge of the epic story of the siege of Troy, though this isn’t absolutely necessary. You will be able to follow the story without any prior knowledge of the characters, but it is more engaging if you have heard some of the names and some of the events. If you know the epic very well, you might be bored at having it retold yet again.

Don’t be put off if you find the beginning slow. This is a novel that operates like a collection of short stories and you could certainly skip chapters here and there, or even read them in a different order, without serious loss of comprehension. Haynes’s style is a little unchanging, and there were times when I wanted the narrative to move along at a brisker pace, but I always felt secure as I read, happy to believe that Haynes has an excellent knowledge of these interweaving tales and the imagination and empathy to inhabit the women’s minds in a plausible fashion.

Other novels on similar themes: Circe by Madeline Miller, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, A Second Chance (Book 3 in The Chronicles of St Mary’s) by Jodi Taylor [highly recommended series if you fancy a comic, occasionally silly, occasionally poignant, occasionally scary romp through history with a bunch of time-travelling historians).

You can find out more about Natalie Haynes at: https://www.facebook.com/nataliehaynesstandupclassicist/

RATING: A Thousand Ships ****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way