Review: The Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 2003. 336 pp. $10; may be out of print

A strong, persistent wind at Aulis has kept the Greek forces from sailing to Troy, and in their restlessness and boredom, contingents from the various city-states bicker and occasionally fight. If the army is to remain unified, the ships must sail, the war must begin, and the men turn their wrath on the Trojan enemy rather than one another.

So begins a familiar myth. This novel concerns itself with a tiny part of that myth, the scheme hatched to appease the gods—who must be angry—and assure a fair wind for Troy. Yet what matters here isn’t so much the plan itself, which is well known, but how it takes root, and how its architects sell it to the leaders who must enact it and the men they command. In this retelling, what a story it is, full of chicanery, double-dealing, and manipulation, which keeps you guessing. Nothing is ordained, even the ending.

Told in modern speech, Songs of the Kings offers no heroes to admire. Everyone’s looking out for Number One. Realpolitik and greed motivate this lot, not morality or honor (unless you define honor as vanity). Nobody believes that the army has gathered to punish the abduction of Helen, though that’s the pretext. Rather, the Greeks covet Troy’s gold, the city’s geographic position controlling trade routes, and the resulting access to goods and natural resources. This war’s about plunder and power.

The only person who even talks about Helen is her boorish, cuckolded husband, Menelaus. He’ll tell everyone who’ll listen—and they have to, because he’s the king of Sparta—that Paris must have drugged her; she couldn’t have gone with him willingly.

Ajax, the giant dimwit, calls his followers “thick as two planks,” conveniently forgetting that he keeps them around as sycophants. Achilles, the consummate narcissist, enjoys “homicide as a leisure activity.”

Nestor, demented as a rock, babbles in council about a cattle raid from fifty years past. And Odysseus is a shameless liar without scruple or conscience but an exceptional grasp of manipulation. He’s the one who tells the bard what to sing, knowing that what people hear will become the truth, even if it’s false. Spin matters above all.

Each of these counselors wishes to influence and curry favor with Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and nominal leader of the quarrelsome army, who receives them in his tent:

The constant billowing and collapsing of the canvas, like laboring lungs, was beyond his control, as were the flat, smacking sounds of the wind in it. He had put on the skullcap, black silk stitched with gold thread, which he used for audiences of state. Below this his eyes looked huge, dark-ringed and slow, eyes of the sleepless or the drugged. It was hot inside the tent, but he wore the same heavy blue gown, the same thick belt with its buckle of bronze and hanging dagger.

He’s about to be cooked, and not just because his dynasty, the House of Atreus, is cursed. Rather, what his counselors eventually suggest—sacrificing his fourteen-year-old daughter, Iphigeneia, to appease Zeus—will bring that curse to full expression, with catastrophic consequences. But that’s in the future, which nobody can see.

Or almost nobody. One man has a glimpse of disaster: Calchas, the high priest. But he’s unsure of what the gods may be telling him, and he dares not offend the mercurial Agamemnon. So when Calchas’ priestly rivals recount omens that sound patently false to his ears, he temporizes rather than advance his own interpretation.

To be fair, however, he’s operating from a weak position as a foreigner who worships Artemis and holds her coequal with Zeus, facts that leave him open to his rivals’ denunciations. So it’s not just the king’s ear for which he’s battling, or the right way to appease the gods. He’s a feminist, in a way, arguing that a woman (Artemis) shares power with a man (Zeus)—and the case concerns whether a woman lives or dies.

You can guess what Agamemnon, Menelaus, & Co. think of that, or how the priests who serve Zeus portray Calchas’ beliefs, spreading vicious rumors about him in camp. Spin, again.

The center of the controversy, Iphigeneia, has a crucial role—and once more, Unsworth keeps you guessing as to how she’ll proceed. She’s spoiled, full of herself, naive, and willful, as any fourteen-year-old princess might be—and therefore could do anything.

Unsworth’s prose conveys the place and time in its intense physicality of sky, water, and land, paying close attention to light and shadow, and what humans can see (or imagine). I can readily believe in the narrative’s timelessness, even in the modern diction. I can understand the participants’ worldview as underlings of the gods even as they struggle for recognition, to leave their names to posterity. The Songs of the Kings brings a larger-than-life, eternal story to human level, leading me to wonder how much has really changed in the past few thousand years.

I consider this novel one of Unsworth’s best. Rereading it makes me sorry, once again, that he died twelve years ago.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, recalling that I loved it but not remembering exactly why. Now I know.