A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes: Review

My review of Natalie Haynes' latest book, A Thousand Ships, which is a retelling of the Trojan War from female perspectives, is in this week's Spectator.

Literary Review December Children's Book Round Up

From The Iliad, ill. Neil Packer

As December approaches, so, with the regularity of the seasons, comes my round-up for Literary Review, which this year features the following books:

Railhead by Philip Reeve
Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray
Anything that Isn't This by Chris Priestley
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
Boy 23 by Jim Carrington
The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell
Love Notes for Freddie by Eva Rice
Mango & Bambang the Not-A-Pig by Polly Faber, ill. Clara Vulliamy
Nelly and the Quest for Captain Peabody by Roland Chambers, ill. Ella Okstad
The Iliad by Gillian Cross, ill. Neil Packer.

A Homeric simile

At some point in my life I want to do (amongst many other things) an in depth study of Homer's similes. I've been dipping (re-dipping?) into the epic recently; the other day I was mightily struck (as if by a spear) by this example:

“But the son of Atreus kept plying his attack along the rest of the Trojan line, with spear and sword and huge stones, as long as the blood still gushed warm from his wound. But when the wound started to dry and the flow ceased, then sharp pains began to overcome his strength of spirit. As when a woman in labour is taken with the sharp stab of piercing pain sent by the Eileithyiai, daughters of Hera, who bring the bitter pangs of childbirth, so sharp pains began to overcome the son of Atreus’ strength.”

This is Agamemnon, King of the Achaeans, having been stabbed by Koön in the middle of battle; it’s a superimposition of the domestic onto the warlike, a reminder that the mightiest fighter is woman-born and also that women endure perhaps greater pain than that on the field; Agamemnon is the father of his people, so it seems apt that he is compared to a mother in the bloody throes of birth, as death is all around him and blood feeds the ground for a different reason. Homer is so good at showing us inversions of what's going on; always reminding us of other worlds, other lives, and of the endless cycle of generation and death.

(The translation is Martin Hammond’s fine 1987 version, published in a nifty Penguin paperback which I own that is sadly lacking a few pages from Book VI.) 

Alice Oswald at the Southbank Centre

Oswald: vatic

Hello hello, I've written a short piece about the poet Alice Oswald at the Southbank Centre for The Daily Telegraph, available here. She read her latest book, Memorial, in its entirety. Some of you may remember that I reviewed Memorial for the same paper when it came out, and was blown away by its luminous magnificence.

Memorial by Alice Oswald: review

Paris and Helen in the film Troy

I've been very lucky this year with Classics-oriented books to review. I've written about Alice Oswald's beautiful, heartbreaking poem Memorial for The Daily Telegraph, here. It takes the deaths of the heroes and the similes out of the Iliad and sculpts something entirely fresh and exciting.  Each dead soldier is remembered, given life.