THE WAR AT TROY

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 characters from stumbling all over each other on the page—more than can be said for Homer.