I loved this book, Having just finished The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeleine Miller, as well as having read The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, I was worried it might just retread the same ground - a retelling of the Trojan War from a female perspective. However, it was different enough that I really enjoyed it, and felt it rounded out my knowledge of the stories of goddesses like Athene and Aphrodite, as well as the many women like Cassandra, Penelope and Helen. Penelope's imagined letters to Odysseus (reminiscent of Atwood's The Penelopiad) were funny and character-filled, and broke up the chapters well. In between, we are told many of the stories around the Iliad and other classic Greek texts, but always from the point of view of the women involved. Most are stories of distress and sadness, but some are of revenge. Very enjoyable! I fell I understand all the characters so much better now, men and women.

A Thousand Ships is the story of the women of Troy and some of the queens left behind when the Greeks sailed to retrieve Helen. It's absolutely engrossing, moving between individual stories and the women awaiting their respective fates on the beach after Troy falls, as well as interjections from Calliope the Muse and letters from Penelope to her absent husband.

I only know the basics of Greek mythology, but that made no difference to my enjoyment of this. When I started it I wasn't really in the mood for reading and was struggling to concentrate on books (just as Lockdown started in the UK), but I was quickly absolutely engrossed in it and have been thinking over bits of it ever since. The women's different personalities come through, I particularly enjoyed the rather fed up letters from Penelope. A lot of the stories are tragic, but the insights into the Greek gods are also fascinating and if you've read and enjoyed Circe then I'd recommend reading this.

Very original rewriting of the Trojan War from the point of view of all the women involved. I love Greek Myths and this one is particularly beautiful: just a few hours can change History.

I read Circe by Madeline Miller last year and enjoyed it so thought this book might also be up my street. However, I found the narrative much more difficult to get to grips with. It is a much larger story in its vast scope (The Trojan Wars versus an interlude on Odyseuss's journey home to Ithaca) but I found each chapter being written from the point of view of a different character meant that I found it hard work to get into the rhythm of the narrative. This book required a lot of concentration from me. I ultimately found it disjointed and I'm not sure that my graft in sticking with it was rewardede.

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, this title follows in the much-loved footsteps of books such as Madeline Miller’s Circe and Colm Toibin’s House of Names by taking the fabled Greek legend of the Trojan War and narrating its fallout from the viewpoint of the many women who endured and suffered.

“Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it?... Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.”

So, rather than Achilles, Hector and Agamemnon, Natalie invites the reader to bear witness to women’s suffering by, instead, listening to the words of the likes of Penelope, Hecuba, Cassandra, the fabled Helen of Troy… even The Furies.

To quote Natalie’s Calliope: “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."

With so many writers now re-examining and subverting Greek myths, the question inevitably rises of where this one fits in. How does it compare? What does it bring to the party that is different?

Well, humour is one thing it most definitely brings. Of course, the drama is here but Natalie Haynes benefits from being able to invest in a myriad of characters so she has the opportunity to platform the pain with the likes of Iphigenia and Electra, the daughters of Agamemnon, but also to raise the spirits via the gallows humour and acerbic wit of Penelope, the long-suffering wife of Odysseus.

Not only did the Trojan War last a decade but the great Greek General, Odysseus, took many more years to come home as he went off on subsequent adventures with gods and monsters. And all of Penelope’s pent up fury at Odysseus’s selfishness manifests itself a series of quite brilliant letters:

“You met a monster. You met a witch. Cannibals broke your ships. A whirlpool ate your friends…. The dog is fine by the way. Getting older, but aren’t we all?”

But, of course, where breadth is gained, depth is lost. I would have loved a whole book on Cassandra and her visions, or Hecabe’s revenge or Andromache new life after Hector is killed. Instead, though, we get only glimpses, epic lines such as, “Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings,” but little more. Snippets of misery and revenge rather than women’s lives presented as epic on their own.

Perhaps that is the point that Natalie is making – that women are denied the stuff of legend simply because of the curse of their sex – but not much here rights that wrong. I loved reading this but, for me, A Thousand Ships doesn’t quite reach the heights of Circe or House of Names, which were able to truly pivot the Greek myths to revolve around women, rather than solely bear witness to the lives of men and talk about men from another viewpoint.

Nevertheless, I really did enjoy reading this book immensely and I would recommend it wholeheartedly.

A Thousand Ships is a beautiful and complete retelling of the Trojan wars. The beauty of this book is that it not only just retells the classic "Iliad" by Homer, but it adds other narratives from classic literature (like the Odyssey by Homer, the Aeneid by Virgil, and other classics by Ovid etc). The book can be a bit confusing at time, as it sometimes jumps from future to past, however it clearly defines and describes the characters in an easy and entertaining way,
The fact that the whole book is from the viewpoint of the women that lived during the Trojan war, makes this work even better: Haynes suggests to the reader that although these epics are usually associated to the men that participated in the war, the women had a bigger part in the events than what is usually perceived.
Overall I loved this book and I believe it will definitely make the Women's Prize 2020 shortlist.

This book was so gritty and realistic. I am very familiar with the story of the Trojan war and have always wanted to know more about what happened to the women who were caught up in it.

It's by no means an easy read - there's rape, slavery, murder of children, mistreatment of women as well as blood and gore.

The author gives such life to these women who have been silent for so long and for that I applaud her.

Madeline Miller's Circe was a standout stunner for me last year, topping my list of favorites for the year. Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls was also very good though not as strong or rapturous as Circe.

A Thousand Ships did what Silence could not - it made the female perspective of the Trojan War come to vivid, excruciating and joyous life. Where Silence felt decidedly feminist, A Thousand Ships told the tale simply from female (and godly) perspectives without being put upon as a woman 'done wrong by'. They did not judge the right or wrong of male treatment but simply reported it. Things were very different in the ancient world. That doesn't make them right or wrong but we must not measure them by the skewed cultural yard stick of today. There, that's my little rant done. Sorry for that but this book is a stellar example of being pro-woman without being nauseating in it's self-righteousness.

Now, on to the book. Oh! What a brilliant story. I loved the time jumping and the views of the many female characters touched by the Trojan War. As much as I love the story of the war it was great not to relive the entire ten year ordeal blow by blow. But, instead, get a deep feeling for how it impacted women and gods, too. I loved the slow unveiling of the entire reason behind the war. Classic Greek god logic!

I loved this book entirely and wished it could go on and on, exactly as I felt for Circe. I am created to revel in Greek mythology and this is a perfect example of mythology reinvigorated. A joyous, magical work that is worthy of all praise.

'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… 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.'

A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes’s retelling of the Trojan War and its aftermath through the voices of myriad women on both sides of the conflict, struggles under the weight of its own good intentions. First of all, the book is much too aware of what it’s trying to do, and Haynes can’t resist the temptation to use Calliope, the ‘muse’ of the famous opening lines of the Iliad (‘Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles’) to tell us why these female voices are important. The quote above is just one example of Calliope awkwardly spelling out what was already effectively communicated through the framing of this story. Second, because Haynes wants to fracture the narrative through multiple women rather than focus on a few, the novel too often feels directionless and choppy. This can be a common risk when dealing with retellings of myths and legends (I also found Madeline Miller’s Circe too episodic, although overall it is a more interesting novel). Because women are only prominent in a few of the surviving texts, Haynes has to spread her net wide to catch her narrators, and this makes the book’s scope too big – we cover the entire siege of Troy and the full Odyssey, alongside extra stories from less well-known texts, such as the tale of the Amazon Penthesilea.

And thirdly… Pat Barker’s far superior The Silence of the Girls, which also retells the siege of Troy and which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize last year, was criticised for turning away from its female narrator, Briseis, for long periods of time to focus on Achilles, but now I’ve read A Thousand Ships, I’m even more convinced that Barker made the right narrative choices. Because women are simply not present for many of the key events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, this book contains a lot of awkward, compressed narration where characters tell us about events that they didn’t witness themselves. Sometimes, this works. Near the end of the novel, Haynes gets very clever with the prophetess Cassandra, who has been somewhat under-utilised up to this point, and uses her gift of foretelling the future to allow her to watch events as if she is replaying a film (‘Cassandra gave a low moan. This part always made her sick’). Indeed, if this whole novel had been narrated from Cassandra’s perspective, it could have been quite the ride.

But because most of the characters don’t possess Cassandra’s supernatural abilities, this narrative trick usually fails. I especially disliked the Odyssey narrated as a series of letters from Penelope to Odysseus, with Penelope retelling her husband’s exploits having heard about them second-hand through a bard. It’s bad enough that Penelope is an incredibly annoying narrator, with too many ‘witty’ proto-feminist asides (‘Obviously you would not have spent, as the bards have it, a year in her [Circe’s] halls, living as her husband, for the excellent reason that you are my husband, and such behaviour would be beneath you’) but, on reflection, I started to think that this narrative undermined the point of this book. If women at home are as important as men at war, why didn’t Haynes focus on Penelope’s trials, and ignore what Odysseus is up to?

Haynes gave herself a mammoth task, and while I’m impressed by her ambition, I wasn’t sure that she chose the correct structure to support her book. She delivers some brilliant set-piece chapters, but I couldn’t get on board with this novel as a whole, largely because it felt too meta, too self-aware, and too convinced that it’s doing something more original than it actually is.

"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 although 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

- 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.



 
READ 2020

What a harrowing read. So raw and so heart wrenching. It filled me with disgust and disbelief, heart ache and sadness. I teared up at points during the novel and even shouted out in anger or shock. What a truly clever novel depicting the experiences of the 'forgotten' women during the Trojan war. I loved the mix of the gods and the mortal women who were all embroiled in these tragic and life changing events. The book is written so intricately with so much depth; scenes were described so vividly which further added to the raw intensity of the novel. It's just overall a powerful read that any lover of mythology like myself would devour wholeheartedly. It is a tough read but it is an important read and one that I urge others to read and experience.

Thank you to Picador / Pan Mac and NetGalley for a copy of A Thousand Ships.

"A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?" - this line from the afterword of A Thousand Ships sums up the book far better than I ever could.

This book was brilliant, utterly brilliant.

4.5/5

I love Natalie Haynes and was so thrilled to read this book!

She does a great job of really getting into the perspectives of each woman. There is such a difference between the voice of Calliope, Penelope, and the Trojan Women. Each voice feels real and authentic and that she is telling their story.
I absolutely love the idea behind this novel : its about telling all of the stories of the women. Each woman matters, each woman is as brave as their male counterparts.

The only thing is, because she gives voice to many women, it doesnt go into depth as the novel Circe did about Circe or that The Silence Of The Girls did about Breisis. This makes the connection to each woman waver a little bit. Yet it was a great first start in getting to know the women of the trojan war.

3.5 stars

This is the third book I've read about the Trojan war in the last six months (and in my life to be fair) so it felt like an expansion of some of the women's stories,their grief,their sadness,their fear.
Told from multiple points of view from either side of the wall,it skips about in time a bit,so it's good to have a little prior knowledge.
I enjoyed it,but think maybe I don't need to read any more books on this subject for a while

With the influx of fiction based on Greek Mythology in recent years, you may be wondering - do we really need another retelling of The Iliad?
The answer is - absolutely.

Natalie Haynes breathes fresh air into this tired tale by giving us a much needed female perspective. However, where other authors have focused on one character to tell the story, Haynes gives us a plethora of perspectives, and actually tells far more than just one story, covering The Odyssey from Penelope's perspective, as well as numerous other sources to provide more meat to the bones of these women's tales. The women Haynes writes about range from Greeks such as Penelope, and Clytemnestra, Trojan women Hecabe, Polyxena, Andromache and even Goddesses Athene, Hera and Aphrodite.

Haynes uses muse of epic poetry Calliope to change the game, insisting on showing Homer the stories he wishes to shy away from. She works as a fantastic frame to bring all of these divergent tales together, seamlessly tying in relatively unknown stories such as how Eris, the goddess of strife, fits into this rich and wonderful tapestry, or the fates of the Trojan women, something often forgotten or neglected, or indeed, in one fantastic scene, the Fates themselves.

In telling these stories, Haynes refuses to shy away from difficult topics, and she doesn't seek to make them more palatable. We see women abused and treated in abhorrent ways, there is sexual assault, brutal murder and constantly total disregard for the humanity of women. However, A Thousand Ships is not a hopeless or despairing view of women's lives or experiences. Haynes shows strong women, women who fight, women who survive through unimaginable trauma, and women who seek to do everything they can for their families and the people they love.

While many will make the case for original stories rather than retelling existing ones, what Haynes achieves with this book illustrates just how important is to shed light on characters in mythology, legend and history who have been neglected and underrepresented. Haynes has written a truly outstanding book which highlights the importance of telling a multitude of stories and is concerned with the very nature of storytelling itself.