Title The Song of Troy Series --- Author Colleen McCullough Cover Art Sarah Perkins Publisher Orion Books - 1998 First Printing Orion Books - 1998 Category Mythology Warnings --- Main Characters Priam, Peleus, Hektor, Paris, Helen, Chiron, Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes, Patrokles, Brise, Nestor, Automedon, Neoptolemus, Aeneas Main Elements Mythology

The Song of Troy is Collen McCullough at her supreme best as she recounts the tragic and terrible saga of the Trojan War, a three-thousand-year-old tale of enduring love, abiding hate, vengeance, betrayal, honour and sacrifice.

As urgent and passionate as if told for the first time, the narrative is passed from one character to another: Priam, King of Troy, doomed to make the wrong decisions for the right reasons; the Greek princess Helen, a self-indulgent beauty who deserts her boring husband for the sake of an equally self-indulgent beauty, the Trojan Prince Paris; the haunted fighting machine Achilles; the heroically noble Hektor; the subtle and brilliant Odysseus; Agamemnon, King of Kings, who consents to the unspeakable in order to launch his thousand ships, and thus incurs the enmity of his terrifying wife, Klytemnestra.

But where does human folly end? And where does the pitiless retribution of the Gods begin? The characters dazzle, swinging our sympathies from Greece to Troy and back again as each of them moves inexorably towards a fate even the Gods cannot avert.

I started off the year with Homer, and while it wasn't my plan, I ended up reading several variations on The Iliad and The Odyssey (as well as Virgil's Aenaid). Having read one of McCullough's Rome books (will one day get around to the whole series) I was really eager to read her take on this classic tale.

I really enjoyed two things about her version. First, she wrote from the point of view of many of the characters, on both sides of the war. Thus we get to see the story through the eyes of the main Greeks like Agamemnon and Achilles and Odysseus, but also what the Trojans were thinking and doing during that time, with Priam and Hecktor and Paris. And don't forget Helen, who probably gets a whole sentence of dialog in The Iliad, though at least in the original I could pretend she had been taken by force, but here, she just thinks her husband is ugly and that Paris is cute, and the she gets bored of Paris and wants to go back, not caring really of the thousands that died for her on both sides. We also get to see a few minor characters such as Diomedes and Patrokles and what they think of the major players.

The second thing I though I didn't like but then decided I did, was to take out every fantastical element and explain it away through human intervention. The Iliad starts with Apollo sending a plague to the Greeks since they wouldn't return the daughter of one of priests, but in The Song of Troy, it is a trick by Odysseus, given the army some herbs to they would be ill for a while to trick the Trojans into thinking the Greeks were weakened and not in favour with the gods, otherwise they would just sit behind their walls and wait for the Greeks to just leave. It also explained why Achilles and Agamemnon were acting like spoiled toddlers at the start of the Iliad, I never really understood that and felt that Achilles sitting in his tent while the rest of the Greeks were slaughtered made no sense whatsoever, but now, now it makes sense! And yes, can blame Odysseus for that one too...he's to blame for quite a bit really. In fact, even explaining that while Helen was a good excuse to go, the Greeks were really there to destroy the Trojan stranglehold on the import of tin and copper which the Greeks needed to make bronze.

Thus, even though I've read the original and several variations since, this one was an excellent addition to the re-tellings of the Trojan War, filled in some gaps and perspectives that are missing in the others, giving life and personalities to some of the less important yet major players, and explaining the bits that just didn't seem to make sense otherwise.