The War at Troy FROM THE PUBLISHER
""The people who lived in those days were closer to gods than we are, and great deeds and marvels were commoner then, which is why the stories we have from them are nobler and richer than our own. So that those stories should not pass from the earth, I have decided to set down everything I know of the stories of the war at Troy - of the way it began, of the way it was fought, and of the way in which it was ended."" "With these words Phemius the bard of Ithaca and friend to Odysseus opens Lindsay Clarke's new retelling of the myths and legends that grew up around the war that was fought for the Bronze Age city of Troy and have magnetized the imagination of the world ever since." "Here are the tales of two powerful generations of men and women, living out their destinies in the timeless zone where myth and history intersect and where the conflicts of the human heart are mirrored by quarrels among immortal gods. Peleus and Thetis, Paris and Helen, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, Achilles, Odysseus and Hector - all are given new life in a version of their stories which remains faithful to the mythic form in which they first appeared yet engages the reader in a contemporary drama of the passions." The War at Troy speaks to a world still racked by violent conflict in ways which address important aspects of our own experience while at the same time providing imaginative access to the rich store of mythology which is our heritage from the ancient world.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Whitbread-winner Clarke (The Chymical Wedding, 1989, etc.) offers a fresh and lively retelling of the Trojan War: a kind of ur-text of the events that made Homer famous. Peleus and Thetis provide a good example of the most dangerous part of planning a wedding: the guest list. They blackball Eris, the Goddess of Discord, who takes her revenge by tossing a golden apple marked "To the Fairest" into the banquet hall. Naturally, Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite all go ballistic and turn to Zeus to settle the dispute-which he does by passing the buck to Paris, the most beautiful man in the world, and asking him to judge. By choosing Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, Paris earns the hand of Helen, the most beautiful woman alive-and that's where all hell breaks loose. Helen is the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who flies into a royal rage when Paris abducts his bride to Troy. Menelaus invokes a prenuptial agreement he'd made with all of Helen's prior suitors (who had agreed in advance to support whomever she chooses to wed), and the whole of Greece goes to war against Troy. You probably remember the story, with all the familiar characters here: the noble warriors Hector, Achilles, and Patroclus; the kings Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Laomedon; the wily Odysseus; and the resourceful Aeneas. We get as far as Odysseus's breach of the walls of Troy with his wooden horse, although the narrator (a certain Phemius of Ithaca) lets us know that he was present at the hero's homecoming-so a sequel is probably in the offing. Clarke uses a modern idiom that's sometimes jarring ("Hera hissed, 'Don't you dare take any notice of that mindless bitch' ") but never ridiculous, and he manages to keep the large cast of charactersfrom stumbling all over each other on the page-more than can be said for Homer. Agent: Pat Kavanagh
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