A Thousand Ships - August 2024 Book Group discussion thread
8 watchers
31 Jul
9:26am, 31 Jul 2024
54,314 posts
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McGoohan
TheScribbler has chosen Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships for the August 2024 read. Here's a spooky thing: Natalie Haynes was born and lived in... Bournville. If you turn to page 237 of your copy of J. Coe's novel of the same name and our June choice, you will find Natalie Haynes peeking out between the lines. Haynes is also a stand-up comedian, TV and radio writer and presenter as well as classicist and journalist. She has written extensively on the ancient world and mythology both fiction and non-fiction and has also written children's and YA novels. A Thousand Ships is her retelling of the Trojan War from a female perspective. It's probably fair to say: she knows what she's talking about! |
31 Jul
10:20am, 31 Jul 2024
87,324 posts
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Diogenes
Damn, I'm at work and my copy of Bournville is at home, otherwise I'd be fact-checking your post right this very second.
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31 Jul
10:24am, 31 Jul 2024
54,318 posts
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McGoohan
You have to read *electron-microscopically* between the lines
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5 Aug
8:29pm, 5 Aug 2024
54,358 posts
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McGoohan
First thing to say is I was shocked and surprised by The Scribbler’s choice this month as Liebling was already reading Pandora’s Jar also by Natalie Haynes. The two books make a natural pair. Pandora’s Jar is a non-fiction reclaiming of women’s roles in the myths of Ancient Greece. That book takes one woman at a time, Pandora, Penelope, Clytemnestra etc and examines the various origins and versions of the stories around each one. A Thousand Ships seems to be a different slicing of the same material and with the fictional slant. I whizzed through A Thousand Ships. It was quite an easy read and the writing is often very high-quality. I enjoyed the overall thesis of the book too, reclaiming the women’s stories from where they had been hidden. But…. I have to say, as a ‘novel, it didn’t work for me. I suppose I expected something more of a linear narrative, a retelling of the Iliad from a feminist perspective. But it wasn’t that. It was 43 quite often unrelated chapters. The experience of one woman of the era would be described and next chapter, we move on to someone else. This had the odd effect of bringing Achilles and Patroclus etc back to life and killing them again, several times. I found this very irritating. The whole is really disjointed. Once I stopped expecting a narrative or throughline of any kind, I accepted it a bit more but I didnae like it much. Mostly, I really disliked the whole structure of it. I think this undermined the reclaiming of the women’s part of Greek myths/history because it always felt like we were circling the main story rather than engaging with it. There are some women that we come back to, primarily Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Actually I thought these were the weakest chapters of the lot. On the face of it, Penelope writing letters to her absent husband seems like a good idea but Haynes uses it to really awkwardly repeat episodes from The Odyssey. Because Odysseus is absent and Penelope can’t know about what he’s up to, we have to have her constantly stating ‘I don’t know where you are but the bards tell that you landed on an island occupied by cyclopses’. That sort of thing. I think Haynes wanted to depict a woman waiting at home, endlessly but she didn’t have the material to do it, so just repeats Odysseus’s adventures. And that kind of undermined Penelope’s importance for me. The other problem was that I previously read Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles – for this very Book Group (May 2019) - which I loved. I suppose that was reclaiming the LGBT aspect of Greek myths but it was one story, well-told. And in recent years, the modernised retelling of ancient myths has become a genre unto itself. Pat Barker did a similar thing with The Silence of the Girls. I even have Ithaca by Claire North (a retelling of The Odyssey from, ulp, Penelope’s point of view). I realise that Natalie Haynes is an expert on this subject and I am not. In the end, I didn’t hate it but it was only ‘okay’. I was stuck on a score but I think I’ll throw a 6 her way. |
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5 Aug
8:48pm, 5 Aug 2024
54,361 posts
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McGoohan
Oh, meant to say: I did also read Madeleine Miller's follow-up, Circe and I thought that had the same problems the Penelope bits did - nothing much happens to Circe: she stays on her island and recounts stuff happening elsewhere to other people, mostly.
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9 Aug
11:57am, 9 Aug 2024
6,323 posts
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TheScribbler
Agree that it doesn’t really hang together as a novel, but I don’t mind the connected short story approach. I think that may be influenced by taking inspiration from different classical texts too. Although I love the tone of Hayne’s savvy and smart Penelope, I think it owes a massive debt to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which, from memory has a similarly fragmented structure. |
14 Aug
10:44am, 14 Aug 2024
152,975 posts
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GregP
See here's the thing. It's a theological college staple to have to re-write a well known bible story from the perspective of an unnamed observer - I think I had to do the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7) *and* the cleansing of the temple (Matthew 21:12–17 etc). These make for interesting thought experiments, but nobody would suggest they got published, or even read apart from by one's peer group, course leader and (if they are particularly troubling) spiritual director. One Thousand Ships and a Feather reminds me very, very much of those long lost days. Doesn't want to make me launch another attempt at reforming the Church of England mind. For that I am truly grateful. |
19 Aug
11:53am, 19 Aug 2024
22,562 posts
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Columba
I enjoyed this book, though it was rather "bitty" with so many different POVs jostling together. I particularly enjoyed the biting sarcasm in Penelope's letters, and also appreciated the author's take on Cassandra. The Cassandra story (prophecies always accurate yet never believed) used to puzzle me; surely people would have noticed that her prophecies always came true, and then they would have started believing her? - but Cassandra as seen by the author, - muttering, not listened to, not heard - is entirely explicable. Let's see what the rest of us thought. |
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19 Aug
11:58am, 19 Aug 2024
22,563 posts
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Columba
@GregP That sounds like an Ignatian approach.
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26 Aug
6:34pm, 26 Aug 2024
15,314 posts
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Little Nemo
I wasn't completely looking forward to this choice initially for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I've read 2 other books set around the same time and there appears to be a lot of authors jumping on the Greek Myths bandwagon. Secondly, I did try the first few pages of another of her books (it was on special offer on Kindle) and didn't take to the writing style. So I was presently surprised with how much I enjoyed this book. It's not as tightly plotted as Madelaine Miller's The Song of Achilles as it covers a larger period so there were some new to me stories. It's not quite as well written as Pat Barker's Women of Troy book but it's still a good read. It took a while to get used to the cast of different characters and that many of them would only be telling one story but after the first few sections it was fine. I did the enjoy the sarcastic nature of Penelope's letters to Odysseus and Calliope bitching about the poet and his requests. My main criticism is not exactly the fault of the author but just that the stories do tend to be a bit repetitive with all the revenge carried out back and forth. I also found the ending for Andromache a very downbeat way to finish off the book. On the whole though it was a good read and I may try more of her books if I find them in the library. I gave this book a 7. |
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