Homer’s Iliad, as Natalie Haynes notes in the afterword to A Thousand Ships, is rightly regarded as “one of the great foundational texts on war and warriors, men and masculinity”. Recently we’ve seen a wave of novels that offer a new slant on its male-centred vision. Pat Barker gave Briseis, a minor character in Homer’s epic, a powerful narrative voice of her own in The Silence of the Girls. From the Odyssey Madeline Miller’s Circespotlights the sorceress who detains Odysseus on his way back from Troy; both are shortlisted for the Women’s prize. Now Haynes, who has a background in classics, provides a bold choral retelling of the Iliad that’s panoramic and playful yet makes a serious comment on war and its true cost.
Haynes previously reimagined the Oedipus story in her 2017 novel The Children of Jocasta. Here she sets out to demonstrate that the Trojan war “is a woman’s war, just as much as it is the men’s”, and to draw attention to “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”. As she reminds us drily, “they have waited long enough for their turn”. But she is also interested in the business of how narratives are assembled. Her main narrator is Calliope, muse of epic poetry. She answers Homer’s famous invocation – “Sing, Muse, he says, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request” – by leading him on a zigzagging journey. What we get isn’t a single, linear story but a series of stories, as the voices that have been muffled up till now – “the forgotten, the ignored” – begin to speak.
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