Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I am reviewing A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. This book was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and this is not the first retelling of The Iliad to be considered for this accolade; The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, for example, won this award in 2012, and The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker was shortlisted in 2019. Read my review for The Song of Achilles here, whereas my review for The Silence of the Girls is posted here. Circe by Madeline Miller was also considered for this award in 2019. My review for this novel is posted here.
“It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialised as much as any other person.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. However, I am also aware that the way the author chose to approach the subject matter has proved to be rather controversial with many readers. The book’s synopsis, for instance, pitches that this book is a retelling of The Iliad from a female perspective; from the point of view of, for example, the noble women of Troy captured as spoils of war, of the goddesses who quarreled amongst themselves to see which one of them was the fairest of all three of them, and whose disagreement led to the Trojan War (in a retelling of the Judgement of Paris); of the Amazonian warrior who had nothing left to live for, and went to die at Troy; of the girl who was tricked into believing she would marry Achilles only to be sacrificed by her own father who was seeking favorable winds to sail out to Troy, and of course, of the woman most despised by all other women; the woman whose unfaithfulness cost so many lives, Helen of Troy; of all the women who lost children, husbands, freedom, and in some instances their lives; of all those women and their grief. A women’s epic, it says. However, in wanting to show the perspective of all these women as much as possible, the final result feels rather disjointed, and the book reads more like an amalgam of all the myths leading up to and after the Trojan War instead of an actual novel relating the events of The Iliad. In this, it is similar to the children’s book The Trojan War by Olivia Coolidge.
Moreover, in wanting to portray how The Trojan War has affected all of these women the book doesn’t let us get to know any of them all that much and, even less, empathize with them. We only meet Creusa, Oenone, Laodamia, and Polyxena, for example, once, while others like The Trojan Women, Penelope, and Calliope show up several times. This makes the book, as I said before, feel more like a recount of the myths themselves, and, to a point, this is exactly what A Thousand Ships is, in a similar fashion to Mythos by Stephen Fry. And in my opinion, this is both a pro and a con. It is a pro because it makes Greek mythology more accessible to modern readers, and more specifically, The Iliad; it is a con, on the other hand, because it gives the story a sense of detachment and it distances the reader from all the emotions that the author is trying to convey, and if that is not what you are looking for when you read this book, I get why many people ended up not liking it.
“But this is a 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.”
When I first read the synopsis of this book, however, I was not expecting it to be the story of these women’s lives, before or after the war. In addition, this is not a feminist book, and I don’t think anyone should go into it expecting it to be; the fact that it is told from the women’s point of view doesn’t make it one. You’ll only be disappointed and disillusioned. This is a retelling of The Iliad, as pedantic as this may sound (I apologize), and The Iliad is a book about war; more specifically, the role of Achilles’ wrath in that war. Achilles is the protagonist of the poem. So I think that it’s natural that the women narrate the events of the poem in which Achilles and the other heroes, such as Hector, Patroclus, Odysseus, Agamemnon, and others, take part. Agamemnon’s role, for instance, in the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice is crucial and the ultimate cause of Clytemnestra’s eventual hatred of him (this myth too is mentioned in A Thousand Ships), or Peleus, briefly mentioned in the chapter relating his wedding to Thetis, is also very important so that the Trojan War could eventually occur and, with it, Achilles’ central role in it. In short, I don’t think that the role of these men in the poem should be lessened or ignored any more than that of the women. I applaud what the author wanted to do, give a voice to these women, and to let them tell their part in the story. That is what the book is about. Their untold story. I gave this book an I Really Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
