Troy

Main Review:

My first fiction review of the year was a book about the Trojan War and so, given everything that’s happened this year, I figured I was allowed to be a little self-indulgent and close out the year with more tales of Troy. I’ve long admired Stephen Fry as an actor, author and broadcaster (I once dressed as him for a charity event at school) and having enjoyed his two previous books on the Ancient Greek world, the bar was pretty high for ‘round 3’ – possibly too high…

Opening the front cover of Troy I was greeted with maps, a timeline and a family tree of the Olympians, and things looked bright. But then within the third sentence of the very first page, I started to worry, when Fry labelled the city of Troy as the ‘gatekeeper of traffic in and out of the barbarous east’. That little orientalist snippet just caught in my throat, and I realised that the book was going to more ‘traditional’ in its telling of the story than the other recent authors who have adapted and appropriated the tale.

Rather than starting with the contest for the Golden Apple, or even with Zeus and Gaia plotting, Fry starts the tale of Troy with its actual construction. Almost immediately you are reminded that this is the third book of a series, and the references and links between the books come quick and fast. It’s perhaps best to think of them as akin to the MCU, with characters from other legends appearing in greater or lesser roles as Troy goes from fledgling town to Illium of the Topless Towers. Fry seems to have fun following through on his tangents and detours, and even flat out refers to one of the sections as an ‘origin story’ at one point.

Compared with the way that Haynes or Miller approached the story of Peleus and Thetis, Fry opts for a thoroughly white-washed and sanitised version of the tale in which Peleus just holds Thetis for a bit until she relents and then he ‘makes her his’ and this is all okay because the whole thing is in destiny’s hands anyway. They get married and everyone who’s anyone is there and everything is wonderful with no second thoughts or issues whatsoever.

When the Golden Apple makes its appearance at Peleus and Thetis’ wedding, I found it odd that within the narrative, Fry chose to use ‘to the fairest’ as the inscription; particularly when he openly notes its translation as ‘to the most beautiful’ in a footnote on the very first page. Speaking of his footnotes, much like with his earlier books, these were often where the most interesting nuggets of extra information were to be found. One that stood out to me was when discussing Hecuba, Fry notes that her lineage is not widely known. He takes this as a spring point to tell a funny anecdote about Tiberius the Roman Emperor and concludes by commentating that it’s absurd to imagine that every detail of a mythological family tree could be sketched out. Whilst I agree in principle, I couldn’t help but notice that we’d already gone on multiple tangents explaining the parentage of the many (male) heroes of the story, and found it a little on the nose that it was only when the female characters begin to be discussed that suddenly we can’t expect to know more than a snippet about them. And I get that the nub of the issue lies with the Ancient Greeks, but there’s no excuse for Fry for not raising it and drawing attention to where the gaps in the knowledge lie.

Compared to Heroes and Mythos before it, there didn’t seem to be as much of a spark to Fry’s writing in Troy as I had hoped for. It’s possible that part of this comes from his ‘eye in the sky’ method of telling the story. So many adaptations of the Trojan War focus on specific characters, letting us see all the events through their eyes. Fry’s method by contrast made everything seem more historical but less engaging as a result, and less like a story. His tone often seems to slide away from the playful to the patronising. He summarises the lineage of Agamemnon and Menelaus in less than a page, explaining the war fought between their father and uncle with its myriad of twists and turns, but then proceeds to congratulate the reader on being able to comprehend what they just read in a way that felt a little too much like a disingenuous sort of ‘oh well done you!”.

There’s lots to be unpacked in which elements of the story specific writers focus on; on what elements they embellish, in who they encourage us to sympathise with and the like. And as I proceeded through Troy I kept my eye out for similarities and differences with the other retellings that are now available. One of the most notable of these fairly early on was the story of Paris meeting Helen. Although he mentions that alternative perspectives exist, Fry opts for presenting Helen as being ‘taken’ from Sparta as part of a cunningly crafted coup by Paris, who goes so far as to ‘loot the palace’ along with its queen. It’s a lot more active and ‘criminal’ than other depictions, but sadly continues the great trend of leaving Helen as little more than a passive object just waiting to be scooped up by a man. I couldn’t help but feel that Fry was deliberately amping up the looting and destruction by Paris to justify the eventual fate of Troy itself? Regardless, there’s very little love lost between Paris and Helen, a far cry from their achingly tragic yet beautiful story in George’s version of the tale. Helen is not the only character who gets short-changed, however. The clearest downside to playing the story ‘straight’ is that most of the female characters find their time in the spotlight greatly reduced, and the traumatic events many of them undergo feel almost nonchalantly skirted over. To read about them here, you’d never know that Chrisayis and Briseis do enough to be able to be made protagonists by Emily Hauser. Characters who don’t appear at all in the Illiad are even more reduced. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons is barely more than a footnote in this story. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind quite as much if the book wasn’t quite as short, it’s only a few hundred pages, hardly a ‘doorstopper’, and there’s so much room for characters and events to be fleshed out in greater detail.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the male characters who get the lion’s share of the story to themselves. Even Agamemnon is not treated with the same level of opprobrium that other authors opt for. Fry paints him as proud and short-tempered yes, but there’s more than one moment where we seem to be being led to sympathise with his exasperation at the squabbling and incompetence of those around him rather than criticising him for his pig-headedness and megalomania. The clearest difference between Fry’s Agamemnon and say Miller’s comes during the scenes in Aulus. The decision to sacrifice his daughter weighs heavily on the Agamemnon of this story, with lots of handwringing and indecision, as opposed to its presentation as a secret plot in Song of Achilles.

Once the war begins in earnest, we are met with the standout section of the book, in which Diomedes achieves a moment of triumph (his aristeia) and begins to carve his way through the Trojan warriors. Fry’s prose really captures the frenetic energy of the original scene, with the gods of both sides playing a sort of speed chess to try ensure victory for their side whilst Diomedes just rampages on. It put me in mind of an election night, with staffers and aides rushing around, trying to make sense of what is going on and trying to prepare for what’s going to come next. Once Diomedes has had his moment, everyone else clearly wants to have their turn, with Agamemnon, Patroclus and Menelaus all apparently meeting the ‘triumph’ threshold one after another. I couldn’t help but comparing to the growing trend of video games for characters having ‘ultimates’, special powers that make them stand out from everyone else. Once I’d had that thought, I found myself chuckling at the idea of Menelaus starting to glow gold and having a ring of fire burning around him.

Once Achilles, Hector and Ajax are out of the way, the book takes a sharp turn for a chapter or two into a sort of buddy-cop comedy. Wily Odysseus and surly Diomedes suddenly seem unable to spend more than 5 minutes in the Achaean camp without being sent to collect someone or something that is needed before the final showdown can begin. Fortunately, Fry does give at least a knowing nod to the dynamic by the third instance, and after a few chapters involving murder, suicide and madness, I was grateful to have just a small moment of reprieve.

When Troy does fall, its sacking by the Greek forces still maintains a palpable aura of shock and fear. Here Fry treads a careful line between alluding to the brutality without needing to present too much directly. Instead he opts for real-world similarities, comparing it with the actions of the Red Army of WW2, the British reprisals in India or the Americans in Vietnam. The second and third of these comparisons stood out to be as a surprisingly bold connection to draw, given the relatively straight-laced form of the rest of the story.

For some reason, I had always thought of the murder of Astyanax (Hector’s Son and the Heir to Troy) as a decision actively made by the Greek leaders to stop a resurgent Troy in the future. In Fry’s version, it is the act of a blood-crazed by un-named Greek soldier. Maybe Fry didn’t want to tarnish the reputation of great Agamemnon by having him coldly order the death of a baby without the ‘justification’ a chaotic night at the culmination of a 10-year war.

As Troy’s topless towers fall, the book just sort of ends. There’s little fanfare, just a quick comment about the Gods seeking vengeance, but nary a mention of the eventual fates of any of the main Grecian characters. The only justification, in my eye for such an abrupt ending is that there’s more to come. Given I called this book at the end of my Heroes review, I want to go one step further this time and wager that it’ll simply be called ‘Odyssey’.

All in all, Troy was a bit of a mixed bag for me. If you want a traditional overview of the story, you can’t really fault it, informative yet fun. But for those people who know the tale and want to lose themselves once more in a world of gods and heroes, there are much more engaging and imaginative versions of the story out there, especially for those who think of female characters as much than just a footnote to crusty old white men.