Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > A Thousand Ships

Now published in paperback.

I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves). I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused, and how its consequences played out.

I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Women’s Prize - for which it has now been shortlisted.

I had already been drawn to it by: my enjoyment of other female-viewpoint retellings of connected events (such as “Silence of the Girls” and “Circe” – both of which I enjoyed); the author’s excellent chairing of the 2019 Booker shortlist readings.

The opening quote to my review sets out the basis of the book – and is spoken by Calliope (who Haynes believes must be the Muse in the opening line of Homer’s “Odyssey”) to Homer as she forces him to consider an alternative history. Homer is not actually named in Haynes’ text – just of course as the Muse is not named by Homer – and this small detail gets to the heart of Haynes’ aim here, which is to focus the story on the true (or at least equal) heroes of the Trojan War – the suffering women of Troy, the women of Greece waiting years for their husbands or sons to return. Even here, as the aside reference to Helen shows, she tries to give equal prominence to female characters mentioned only in passing in the classical sources as to those much better known.

The book skips between the stories of these characters – mainly told in a third party point of view style. There are also three sets of recurring chapters:

- Calliope’s comments on her interactions with the writer – which effectively serve as an opportunity for Haynes to review the previous set of chapter (since Calliope last spoke) and expand on her themes and ideas. These sections are in my view the strongest of the book

And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she? There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the 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. And for what reason? Too many men telling the stories of men to each other. Do they see themselves reflected in the glory of Achilles? Do their ageing bodies feel strong when they describe his youth? Is the fat belly of a feasted poet reminiscent of the hard muscles of Hector? The idea is absurd. And yet, there must be some reason why they tell and retell tales of men. If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: 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 those is the more heroic act?

- A progressive narrative “The Trojan Women” – Hecabe and her family (including Cassandra – who I found one of the most compelling characters) wait on the shore while Troy burns, as the Greeks divide their spoils (including the women and their children). These sections often serve to give a narrative structure to the story and to introduce/set up other chapters

- An epistolary series – Penelope’s unanswered letters to Odyssey, as she wonders why he has still not returned and recounts the stories she is hearing from the bards of his adventures and escapades. These sections are played somewhat for laughs, Penelope often incredulous at what she is hearing (despite it exactly matching the Odyssey as we know it – eg Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis). I found this a high risk strategy by Haynes: we know from her other work that she is a great believer in the Classics and in the importance of people reading them, but this approach seemed to me to run the risk of showing exactly why we should not read them, by pointing out their general preposterousness. And I think it’s a gamble which does not entirely pay off – I kept thinking that the author (a renowned comedian) would make more of these sections than she actually does.

The other chapters are largely self-contained chapters, focusing on one (or a small number of) characters - these characters include Greeks, Trojans, recent Gods (the Aphrodite, Hera, Athene chapter on The Judgment of Paris is a particular strong point and a favourite of the authors) and the more ancient Gods (Haynes subscribes to the theory that Eris’s missed-wedding induced insertion of a golden apple designed to create her signature strife between the three aforementioned Godesses, was actually a plot by Themis and Zeus – of course in her telling the invention of the former).

Three asides here:

- This latter story matches the opening quote – tracing back the cause of the war, past Paris’s abduction of Helen, back via the Judgement of Paris, via the actions of Eris to their really originating cause. The book also goes many years past the war in the story of Andromache.

- In what I think is pretty-well the only area where Haynes departs from any classical source (although even here I may be incorrect and have just not found the reference) and adds instead more of a deliberate contemporary/topical link Themis and Zeus are motivated by the need to thin out the ranks of mankind as Gaia is finding it too hard to carry the weight of mankind and their expansion

- When deciding how to kill of some of mankind, and in what is clearly a completely accidental topical link, Themis and Zeus reject plague as

“Too inexact. Sometimes it just picks off the old, who would be dead soon anyway”

The issue with these chapters though is that due both to their sheer number and brevity, I feel that in many cases the author does not really capture the voice or character of the chapter’s subject. Too many of the chapters I felt ended up reading like expanded Wikipedia entries, running through the basic story, and often to be honest just recounting the more normal men’s story just observed by a woman. Two classic cases (and which link to other recent books) are:

- The chapter on Briseis and Chryseis, which almost reads like a plot summary of “The Silence of The Girls” but without the latter’s clever deliberate anachronisms (although also without its misjudged switch to male viewpoint).

- The chapter on Iphengia (which echoes the opening of Colm Toibin’s “House of Names”) in which we wait to see how the horror of her fate gradually unfolds on her, only to find its in a single paragraph

And then she saw the glint of her father’s knife in the morning sun and she understood everything in a rush, as though a god had put the words into her mind. The treacherous stillness in the air was divinely sent. Artemis had been affronted by something her father had done, and now she demanded a sacrifice or the ships would not sail. So there would be no marriage, no husband for Iphigenia. Not today and not ever.

Overall I think this book works very well as a female-centric survey of and intrroduction to the Greek legends – and hence I think succeeds exactly on the basis on which it was formulated and written. I was less convinced of it as a piece of literature and would rank behind both Pat Barker and Madeline Miller’s books which were longlisted for last year’s prize – it was nevertheless enjoyable.

And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them.

My thanks to Picador for an ARC via NetGalley.