Sing, Muse, of the Women: Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships
An old story can experience new life when told from a different perspective – and the Trojan War is a very old story. Perhaps we haven’t read about it since school and the entirety of the massive cast is hazy, but we all still remember the basics: Prince Paris of Troy steals away with Helen, another man’s wife, the most beautiful woman in the world. Her husband, King Menelaus, appeals to his brother, Agamemnon, and they assemble a force like the world has never seen. A thousand ships set sail to besiege the city of Troy, with its impenetrable walls. Years pass while a seemingly endless war rages. There is wily Odysseus, bloody Achilles, a giant wooden horse. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Gods and goddesses choose both to favor and undermine, playing their capricious games. And death, there is so much suffering and death.
Natalie Haynes’s novel, A Thousand Ships (Picador UK, 2020 / Harper US, 2021), was shortlisted for the United Kingdom’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. It offers a new perspective on this ancient story through the eyes of the myriad of women to whom the Trojan War brought fates worse than a battlefield death: “When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.” When asked why exploring this motif appealed, Haynes answers, “I felt that no one really benefits from one-sided war narratives which seemed to have become the norm: men in the trenches or the jungle, women non-existent. This goes back a long way. I don’t know how many times I translated passages of Latin or Greek by Livy or Thucydides at school, where there were pages and pages of descriptions of cavalry charges and infantry formations. Then you might get a sentence or two explaining that after the battle had been lost, all the men were killed and the women and children enslaved.”
Haynes doesn’t find this approach surprising, only notes that it’s time to add to the narrative by looking at the fate of the women and children. “After all,” she says, “death really is an ending, but slavery isn’t: an enslaved life is one which needs to be told, just as much as a free one. I think it’s really interesting that Euripides – the Greek tragedian – wrote eight tragedies about the Trojan War that survive to us today. Seven of them have women as the title characters; only one is named for a man. He knew that the drama of war was in its build-up and its aftermath, places where women are. War isn’t just fighting, and winning sometimes costs as much as losing (we often see in Greek tragedies that the victorious warriors are so brutalized by their victory that they may never get back to any kind of ‘normal’ life).”
So how does one choose the perspectives – the voices – to speak, the stories to tell? Haynes shares, “I had the idea for the structure within ten seconds of having the idea for the book (it changed a bit, but not much). I knew I wanted to tell the story of the war from the perspectives of its women and only its women. I was certain the whole war could be explored that way.”
Of course, with such a vast canvas, there isn’t room for everyone. Haynes says, “I thought at first that I’d be able to include them all, but there were just too many! So I had to lose some and focus on others. It was a painful process, winnowing the cast list down. There were some I knew I had to keep (Clytemnestra’s chapter is one of my favourites, I spent the whole book looking forward to writing her). There were some I thought I would need but then didn’t. And there were others who I thought I would be asked to edit out, but they were my editor’s favourites. You can never tell.”
The novel has a distinct structure: “My plan from the beginning was to tell the story of the causes of the war backwards (beginning with the most recent, and working further and further back through time), and tell the story of the consequences of the war forwards (so we followed the lives of the Trojan women in the aftermath of fall of their city as they shift from free to slave, and the Greek women as their men finally make it home). I wanted the book to begin with the Trojan horse, because it is such an iconic moment and I wanted readers to feel like they knew where they were at the beginning, before I took them off in multiple directions.”
To do this, Haynes primarily uses third-person, but allows two voices to narrate their own tales: Calliope, the muse, and Penelope, through a series of first-person letters to her absent husband, Ulysses. Originally, a variety of women from the Odyssey – Calypso, Circe, Eurycleia, Scylla – were to tell their own stories. However, Haynes says, “At the end of Penelope’s first chapter I liked her so much, I decided I would ditch the others and tell all of their stories through her eyes. That gave the reader fewer voices and characters to keep track of (no bad thing, given how many were already in play…), and it also gave me the chance to build Penelope through the book, her increasing snark and decreasing patience with a husband who takes ten years to complete a journey which should have taken a few weeks.”
Penelope isn’t the only one whose patience has been exhausted. The muse Calliope has a deliciously exasperated voice. Haynes explains, “I had a ball writing her: who doesn’t want to let a muse loose and have her be a bit sarcastic and irritable? Calliope always had to be in the first person, because I wanted the book to begin as a riposte to the opening of the Iliad (the first line of which is: ‘Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.’ I thought, how cool would it be if she replied, and she wasn’t very impressed with being spoken to in that tone?). Initially, Calliope only appeared at the beginning and the end of the book, but she built her part up by refusing to keep quiet (never mess with a muse).”
As Calliope notes about her obtuse writer (Homer), “I’m not sure I could have made it more obvious, but he hasn’t understood at all. 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.” There are many stories to tell, and yet, “The entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident.” When asked, if she had to choose, which incident Haynes would offer, she says, “The revenge Hecabe (Hecuba, if you prefer to give her her Latin name) takes on her enemy, Polymestor.” For those who are a bit rusty on their Greek mythology, Hecabe is the Queen of Troy, wife to Priam, mother of Paris and Hector, and poor, ill-fated Cassandra. She has a total of 19 children, yet the war takes them all. Haynes explains, “Even enslaved she is one of the most dangerous people in the whole story. She looks powerless, but she uses every ounce of persuasion to find a way to take vengeance. She is a woman who has lost everything: her husband, her city, her sons, her daughters, her status. And it makes her pitiable, in some ways, but also terrifying. I think it’s really important to remember that tragedy – extreme and repeated – can create a monster, just as it can create a victim or a survivor. Hecabe is all of those at once, I think. She was a challenge to write in some ways: I often found myself rooting for her at the same time as disliking her intensely.”
This counterpoint to the traditional, male narrative of the Trojan War pushes the men to the margins, since their stories have already been told. As the novel notes, they’ve had their turn. Now, it’s time to offer an equally riveting tale, to focus on these female survivors, victims, monsters, wreakers of terrible revenge. Sing, Muse, of the women of the Trojan War.
About the contributor: Bethany Latham is a Professor, Librarian, and the managing editor of the Historical Novels Review.
