A THOUSAND SHIPS – NATALIE HAYNES – REVIEW

When Natalie Haynes first ventured into the ancient world in 2017, with the Children of Jocasta, she was part of the avant garde of those authors seeking to re-energise the classical world with a reinvocation of old myth. The new wave of books promised to expand on minor characters, and give a voice to the voiceless.

In between publication of The Children of Jocasta and 2019’s A Thousand Ships, the vogue exploded. From Madeline Miller’s meltingly beautiful Circe to Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, reexplanations of old stories were everywhere. They still are. Into 2021, the vogue continues, with novels like The Wolf Den and Barker’s follow up, The Women of Troy (both high up my reading list) energising publishers and readers alike. We are fortunate that that is the case, because these books are some of the most enjoyable, moving and lyrical novels of our times, and A Thousand Ships sits high in the pantheon of these works.

A Thousand Ships sets out to tell nothing less than the stories of the women of Troy – all of them. It is not ashamed of its mission, the centring of women’s roles in conflict, reminding us powerfully that the knock-on effects when men fight are of not just as bad but worse for women than men.

“When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.”

It begins, in a wonderfully clever subversion of the beginnings of the Iliad and Odyssey with a muse. Sing Muse, Homer cries at the start of his great works. Here, the muse Callipe finally gets to do more singing than the poet invoking her. From the very beginning we are reminded to think about the feelings of those we forget, those who men ask too much of.

Other voices quickly follow, all skillfully invoked. These are the voices of tortured women. There is Cassandra, the princess of Troy cruelly cursed both with foreknowledge of the future and foreknowledge that none will believe her. There is Penthesilea’s crushing guilt, Penelope’s frustrated letters into the void, Laodamia throwing herself onto her husband’s pyre, and many more. Each of the women’s challenges is different, finally treated with the dedication it deserves, linked only in so much as they are all victims of the same war.

Even Helen, so often sidelined, or written off as a wily seductress, gets a reinvigoration. To some of the women – most of Hector’s family to tell the truth – she is devious, an active conniver in her kidnapping, to blame for the hurt Troy suffers. But Helen is allowed to speak in her defence, reminding us that “Paris was a married man…Why does everyone always forget that.”

A Thousand Ships is an easy read but not a light one. It is lyrical and beautiful, witty, fast paced, constantly thought provoking but at no point does the novel shy away from the fact that its subject matter is alsp brutal, bleak and upsetting. When the epic poet whines to the muse that retelling Creusa’s death is too painful, she replies unsympathetically.

“It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all of the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too.”

This is a novel full of powerful questions, on the nature of sacrifice, honour, the importance of vengeance. Above all, it questions how we remember, and what we choose to reward. As the muse, so often the most openly challenging voice, puts it,

“Is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of these is the more heroic act?”

Most clever of all is the way that, even focusing only on the women’s suffering, Haynes has produced a powerful ode to peace on behalf of both sexes. The unfairness of consequences, the hollowness of battle glory, the impossible transition back to peace after so long at war, these things affect women and men alike.

“I want to reach down and stroke his hair and tell him everything will be alright. But it wouldn’t be true. Who could say that about a war…He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.”

The danger with painting on so broad a canvas is that an author zigzags across time and place, confounding the reader and spending so little time in one place that they leave uneven brushstrokes or miss a spot. A Thousand Ships skilfully avoids this pitfall. Haynes has put thought into her characters’ voices and they are disparate enough that readers, even those without much knowledge of the source material, will be able to keep up with who is who, and exactly what sorrows each Trojan woman has to grieve for.

Haunting, profound and beautiful, A Thousand Ships is a shining example of the genre.