War has affected them as much as it has the men, and at last they're having their stories told.Ī Thousand Ships takes us through different locations in time and space, covering established moments and events in Greek history and mythology, even seamlessly incorporating deities such as Gaia and Artemis. But it's the women who take center stage. Readers well-versed in Greek epics will find familiarity at the mention of Hector, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Priam and more. This is not to say that there aren't men in the novel.
Twisting the tradition of Greek epics right from the start, A Thousand Ships opens with a muse for a narrator and a queen for a protagonist, rather than a poet-narrator and male-warrior-protagonist, as we see in the Iliad with Homer and his hero Achilles. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, beholds her city - sieged for 10 years by the Greeks - burning. They speak of the Amazon queen Penthesilea and Briseis, wife of the king of Lyrnessus this leads into lengthy chapters exploring the lives and exploits of the mythological female characters.Īfter a prologue of sorts that sets the tone as Calliope teases at what is to come, Haynes' novel begins with the sacking of Troy. While the muse Calliope appears and vanishes several times, the story is also guided by The Trojan Women, a group left vulnerable and frightened as the Greeks sack their home. And it is this approach that ultimately allows A Thousand Ships to shine: There is no central protagonist, nor one established narrator. While Circe and The Silence of the Girls take overlooked women characters - from the Odyssey and Iliad respectively - and add weight and perspective to their stories, Haynes opts for a different approach here.
Now, classicist Natalie Haynes makes a dynamic and important addition to this library with her novel A Thousand Ships. We have even been gifted a fresh translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first-ever rendering of Homer's epic into English to be completed by a woman. Novels like Madeline Miller's Circe and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls have done wonders for fleshing out and adding dimension to the library of stories from ancient Greece that we have been telling and retelling for centuries. Recent years have seen a trend in reinventions of Greek myths and legends, some from the perspectives of women. A Thousand Ships stands out in a rising sea of Greek retellings by taking a kaleidoscopic approach to its narrative and exploring the impact of war on ordinary people.
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