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The Songs of the Kings: A Novel

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Barry Unsworth is clever. He tells the story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia but his commentary is relevant to all times, especially our own. His insertion of contemporary expressions added wry humor. Agamemnon, however, remained a puzzle, motivated by greed and power, determined to unite the Greeks and destroy the Trojans, he is manipulated into a cul de sac by his chief scribe, Odysseus, and the priests of Zeus. He must sacrifice his beloved daughter to appease Zeus and thus change the winds in favor of the Greek fleet. Odysseus, the scribe, and the priests continue to support this course of action openly to build consensus among hte Greeks and maintain the unity of the Greek troops. The one false note here is that when a powerful leader is forced into making such a sacrifice by his counselors, his resentment later erupts to destroy those who manipulated him into a corner. Odysseus was too clever not to recognize that Agamemnon's resentment would eventually erupt and be aimed at those who restricted his previous course of action.

Homosexuality was dealt with in the novel as an ordinary daily occurance, both in the relationship between the priest of Apollo, Calchas and his beautiful acolyte and then in the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, his cousin and lover. Achilles had the cruelty and arrogance of the beautiful and athletic demi-god, cutting of the head of a thief for a petty crime.

Unsworth reveals the desires for power and wealth that motivated the Greeks, using the seduction/kidnapping of Helen by Paris as a pretext. The wronged husband Menelaus is a fool, rapist, bore that surely was disgusting to Helen. In the same way that Agamemnon's revenge was never fully developed, Iphigenia's agreement to her own sacrificial death was not fully developed either. Unsworth states that the father did not have enough sense of duty and the daughter had too much of a sense of duty. Thus he is pressured by Odyssus to assume leadership including making any sacrifice to unite his troops. Iphigenia is also pressured by Odyssus to make her ultimate sacrifice to her father and the nations of Greece as they move toward triumph. I have to give Unsworth credit for writing a page turner, even knowing the end, I was compelled to read faster and faster as the Princess moved toward her doom. In her arrogance, Iphigenia was not a sympathetic victim. But the stupidity and manipulative world of men made her a victim and worthy of some sympathy.

In this novel, Unsworth retells Greek story/myth of Agamemnon, Iphigeneia and the wind at Aulis that just wouldn't stop so that the Greeks could sail to attack Troy and reclaim Helen and their honor.

He writes with a delicious, tongue-in-cheekiness, fleshing out the characters to real people with real, and sometimes annoying, personality traits. The great hero Odysseus is a cocky trouble maker with a penchant for hearing himself speak. Achilles is flamboyant and egotistical. Agamemnon is willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power. Short, unattractive Menelaus is convinced that only kidnapping could have pulled Helen from his side and, um, prowess.

The main theme of the story, though unspoken, is that of public relations--"good press" if you will. The will of the people was easily manipulated through the innuendo, stories and sometimes outright lies told by the Singer. As there was only one Singer in the camp, his good opinion--and his song--was bought by the highest bidder. What they heard the Singer tell was what became the truth. A jab at modern day press, perhaps?

The story is often told from the standpoint of outsiders. Calchas, an Asian priest who has found favor with Agamemnon tells a large part of the narrative, as does Iphigeneia's maid Sisipyla. This looking in from the outside gives a different slant to the story, showing some actions, events and gods as alien.

This alien-ness is balanced by the views of Odysseus (as in the above quotation) and other Greek characters, both major and minor, seeing their world as the only natural way. These two views combine with good solid writing to form a fascinating tale that is hard to put down, even though I knew how it was going to end.

Anyone who enjoys Greek myths and would be amused (as opposed to horrified) to hear famous Greek heroes talk in modern lingo about "CV's" and "glad rags" and "blabbermouths" will probably get a kick out of The Songs of the Kings. I found it a fun read and definitely recommend it, though I was disappointed that Unsworth choose to end it where he did--I felt it should have went on just a bit longer. Nevertheless, I rate it an 8 of 10.

Barry Unsworth shines light on an early event from the annals of the Trojan War--that dark period when the allied Greek fleet was massed at Aulis on the eastern coast of Greece, ready to set out across the Aegean to Troy, but was prevented from sailing by adverse winds. As Unsworth tells it, the assembled Greeks are growing increasingly contentious with the delay, and some remedy is required. The man with a plan, naturally enough, is wily Odysseus--star of Homer's Odyssey--here presented as a Machiavellian manipulator of words and men. Charmingly enough, he is wont to affect being lost for a word, and he compliments whoever supplies him with one with a very British sounding "Brilliant!"

Also on hand are those sons of Atreus, Agamemnon--the commander-in-chief of the operation, from whom a sacrifice is allegedly demanded by Zeus if the ships are ever to get underway--and Menelaus, wronged husband of Helen. You will remember that Helen was spirited away from her home by the Trojan prince Paris, the offense which was the direct cause of the Trojan War (her face launching a thousand ships and all that). Unsworth's Menelaus is a comical buffoon who can't wrap his mind around the possibility that Helen may have run off willingly: "Must I remind you that my Helen is currently in a Trojan dungeon, being violated on an hourly basis? And I've told you before, she wasn't seduced, she was kidnapped."

As the story goes, Agamemnon sends for his daughter Iphigeneia to come to the fleet at Aulis--I shan't tell you why. Thus we have, in the second part of the book, a glimpse of the princess's life at Mycenae. There one evening she tells her slave Sisipyla the story of her family's proud history of incestuous cannibalism: how her great-grandfather Pelops was mashed into a tantalizing stew by his father Tantalus and served to the gods (he got better), and how her grandfather Atreus in turn butchered his brother's three sons and served them up to their father. Sisipyla, hearing the story and thinking to comfort Iphigeneia, who seems strangely affected by the telling of her family's exploits, says, "It's always the children who suffer, isn't it?" A great line.

Unsworth's prose, as you've probably already noticed, is less stilted than one often finds in historical novels, for which I applaud it, though it is admittedly an odd experience to hear his loin-girded characters speak of "collateral damage," or to hear Agamemnon's scribe say of the hero Palamades, "[H]is father was one of that band of heroes who sailed with Jason on the Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece. That's the sort of thing that is bound to look impressive on a person's CV."

Readers who are already familiar with the story of Iphigeneia at Aulis will know more or less how Unsworth's story goes. Or will they? Because there is that alternate ending in which the goddess Artemis steps in and saves the day at the last moment....

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

If you enjoy debunking, a hard headed cynical view of human nature and motives, and real politiks, you will like the premises of this retelling of the Ancient Greek story of King Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia on his way to Troy. Superficially this is a historical novel, with jarring and sardonic intrusions of current political doublespeak which turn into a satire clearly intended for our times.

This is not the first anachronistic retelling of a homeric tale or of Greek myths in Western literature. The great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles and particularly Euripides, rewrote many of the incidents in Homer, debunking heroic myths and exposing the underlying human tragedies; Racine and Corneille continued this tradition in France, Shakespeare contributed to the tradition in his play "Troilus and Cressida", in which, according to the Shakespearean critic G. Wilson Knight:
"The Trojan party stands for human beauty and worth, the Greek party for the bestial and stupid elements of man, the barren stagnancy of intellect divorced from action..." In a sense, some of Freud's key insights are not only based on his knowledge and fascination with Greek myths but explain why the myths have endured and need to be retold generation after generation.

Thus, Barry Unsworth continues with a millennial urge to wrap an ancient story in a more modern language, and chooses to put some new twists on Euripides' classic play "Iphigenia at Aulis". Agamemnon is a king obsessed and blinded by his ambition to lead the Greeks, his brother Menelaos (Helen's cuckolded husband) is a sexual braggart, a vulgar rapist who justifies his crimes by appealing to his noble birth, Achilles is a narcissistic, cold blooded killer (as in Shakespeare) and Ajax a stupid and mediocre commander out of Catch 22 who invents athletic games out of a desire to keep the army from fighting itself and olive wreathes out of stinginess. The two most interesting characters in the novel, who drive most of the action in the novel are Odysseus (Ulysses) and Calchas. Odysseus is portrayed as a pathological liar, an amoral manipulator of men who gets his kicks from herding men along paths of his devising. If Odysseus enjoys twisting and playing with the truth, Calchas, the foreign soothsayer, is an anguished soul searching for the truth. Odysseus dismisses him as an ineffectual intellectual and easily outmanoeuvres him politically, or in the novel's words, "marginalizes" him.

In the end analysis, the novel's premises are interesting and well thought out, but something fails to jell and the novel remains unconvincing. Interesting enough, even Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida", which builds on similar premises, somehow lacks stature and has often been criticized as one of Shakespeare's less successful plays, often labelled as "difficult and incoherent" as G. Wilson Knight points out in a masterly essay on the play in his book "The Wheel of Fire". If you are intrigued by the idea of retelling old stories with a new twist on them, or as Aeschylus himself said treating yourself with "slices from the banquet of Homer", I would recommend you try reading some Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in good, modern translations (Robert Fagles' version of "The Oresteia for example").

If you haven't already done so, take time out to become acquainted with Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" (Merwin and Dimrock's Oxford University Press translation is particularly striking) and with the fountainhead of all Western Literature, Homer's "The Iliad", (say in Richmond Lattimore's stirring translation), and find out why it has fascinated people for almost three thousand years. After all, as Jasper Griffins so aptly quotes in his slim and very readable book on Homer: "No exertion spent upon any of the great classics of the world [...] is really thrown away."

Songs of the Kings begins by making the reader experience a bit of weather -- the wind stranding the Greek fleet at Aulis -- as a source of existential terror. Not only is the wind felt as a breath of divine disfavor, but as a kind of projection of the deadly thugocracy of the Greek leadership. Through the consciousness of the alien priest Calchas, an earnest mystic whose life depends on the kings' favor, readers experience the Homeric heroes as a kind of Stalinist rogues' gallery who will kill anyone who crosses them. It's quite an imaginative accomplishment, sustained through many scenes, such as Odysseus' intimidation of the army's minstrel, to whom he offers a deal he can't refuse: embed our propaganda in your story or...else. (Unsworth has a gift for portraying the arrogant, self-righteous evil of men in power throughout the centuries. His murderous Venetian oligarch in Stone Virgin and vindictive slave merchant in Sacred Hunger would fit right in with the Greek leadership in Songs of the Kings.)

That said, the all-too-plausible recasting of the Greek kings as a band of vain, selfish, cold-blooded killers also strikes many false notes as it's pushed toward contemporary caricature and allegory. The kings' pious justification for 'collateral damage,' for example, breaks the illusion that we're in the grip of real thugs, as does the repetitive swearing, bickering and utter idiocy of the two Ajaxes. What rings true throughout is the priest Calchas' failed struggle to reconcile his mystic intuitions with his terror of crossing his master Agamemnon and the kings and counselors who compete to influence and manipulate the high king.

The other side of this story -- the relationship between Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia and her twin-like slave Sisipyla -- mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of the army scenes. The crux arises from the two teen girls' competing responses to Iphigeneia's 'duty' to go willingly to her own sacrifice (Odysseus has staged false omens to convince Agamemnon that only this sacrifice will remove the gods' disfavor and lift the wind pinning them in Aulis). Sisipyla's consciousness, like Calchas', is fully realized. A slave trained from earliest childhood to want nothing for herself and live only for and through her mistress, she comes through the crucible of the crisis to an epiphany that pierces Odysseus' self-serving propaganda. Iphigeneia, on the other hand, like the Greek kings, devolves into caricature at the crux, becoming simply another ruler who disappears into the myth of her own divinely-ordained destiny.

Song of the Kings imagines slaves and servants with vibrant sympathy but reduces its ruling class characters to two-dimensional tyrants. It's a powerful, but ultimately monocular, parable of power.

As a long-time fan of Greek Mythology, my initial reaction to "The Songs of the Kings" was "sacrilege!". Odysseus as a villain? The absurdly modern speech? But when I tried the book again, I found that it expressed one of the things we love best about Greek Mythology--something about the mythology resonates with us today, after all these centuries. Unsworth reworks the old tale of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis as a startingly modern political tale, and somehow also remains true to the original story. While he portrays many well known characters, such as Menelaus, Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles in unusual ways, which challenge the heroic versions we are familiar with, this expresses new sides of the characters we may have ignored.
The title refers to the mysterious blind singer in the camp of the Greeks who tells old heroic tales, working history into myth. The kings attempt to influence his tales with bribes and threats--his goals and allegiances are unclear. He is not a major player in the story, but a shadowy figure lurking in the margin of every page. He represents, in a way, the idea of Unsworth's novel itself--how stories can be used, altered, and how they can convery glory and immortality to those they remember.

Critically looked at the Trojan War didn't have much more going for it than the cadences of Homer. "The Iliad," gave us heroes splendid on the battlefield but vainglorious when they weren't plunging dagger and spear into each other fighting a ten year war over adultery. In "The Songs of Kings," Barry Unsworth takes that character defect even further by bringing us charlatans, manipulators, gangsters, and buffoons with only the most humble figure displaying any sign of heroism; and he shows us a war fought for an altogether different kind of booty. It wasn't Helen the Greeks were interested in, it was plunder. Mr. Unsworth has done nothing new, but he's done it quite well. He takes the story of the days prior to the launching of the Greek fleet through a minor character's eyes, and reveals the stories behind the story. He even goes so far as to show us how the official story may have been written with bribes and veiled threats directed toward the press of the day - the poet. Mr. Unsworth moves onto a few patches of thin ice as he injects modern vocabulary like, "collateral damage," into the dialogue, and in modernizing his characters, but all in all the effects work, and though they're never less than jarring they add an interesting dimension in the cumulative. Mr. Unsworth has added well to the literature that has grown out of "The Iliad," and though it's a minor work (especially compared to his magnificent "Sacred Hunger,") it is well worth the read.

Those modern contentious bedfellows, religion and politics, clash in Unsworth's novel about a famous incident just before the Trojan War. Though the Greeks gods never appear in the story, they are invoked at every turn as the characters struggle for power.

Major figures from the Iliad all play their parts: gloomy, ambitious Agamemnon, angry Menelaus, senile old Nestor. Odysseus assumes here what has become his standard characterization in western literature -- an accomplished liar who practices deceit as an art form, his voice occasionally thickening with "the saliva of pleasure" when he is manipulating those around him with his verbal skills. He's one of several people whose thoughts the reader is privy to, but there's perhaps a little too much of his verbal trick of leading others to supply the words he pretends to be searching for and rewarding them with the exclamation "Brilliant!" Surely even the other Greek commanders would have grown tired of this conceit after a while. Achilles, the beautiful killer, comes across as little more than an arrogant, bored egotist with "perfectly proportioned shoulders" -- also a standard modern characterization of this hard-to-understand hero, both blessed and cursed by his divine prowess. The author's satirical eye glitters in a reference to "the marvelous tendons of his neck." Calchas, the "foreign" seer from across the Aegean, is one of the main characters in the novel, an intellectual who agonizes over every last detail of a situation until he is all but paralyzed. Some solid historical research is worked into the story in Calchas's devotion to a god as yet foreign to the Greeks at the time -- Apollo.

The victim of Odysseus's machinations, Iphigenia, is presented as a "spoilt and obdurate" princess and priestess of Artemis. Her sensitive slave, Sisipyla, a girl her own age, unaccountably loves her despite being told frequently and condescendingly how "sloppy" her thinking is. Iphigenia herself is subject to faulty thought patterns when, after her impending marriage to the illustrious Achilles has been announced, she tells Sisipyla the story of the curse on her family, concluding that for each link in the chain of tragedies, "There's always a trick, and the trick always ends in murder." After having said that even she is under the family curse, she still has no foreboding about the unusual proposal. Love, or rather, desire for a prestigious marital union, is blind. In this, Iphigenia is a typical materialistic Mycenaean, angling for personal gain like her father. It is the supposedly unintelligent maid who half-wonders to herself about the oddity of an arranged marriage, at a time when the war fleet is stranded by mysterious winds and will eventually be off to Troy, to a warrior who saw Iphigenia only once when she was ten years old. You can foresee the attempted escape at novel's end in the early, somewhat belabored description of the two girls' physical similarity.

According to tradition, the first Olympic games took place in 776 B.C., but Unsworth has fun imagining that the idea of the games popped up hundreds of years earlier as a way to divert the increasingly bored and restless army at Aulis -- right down to the crown of leaves as a prize. He chooses as his inventors the novel's comic relief characters, the red-faced bully Big Ajax (not the sharpest arrow in the quiver) and the foul-mouthed, horny rapist Little Ajax. These two function very much like the rowdy comedies featuring randy satyrs that were staged between tragedies at ancient Greek dramatic festivals.

There are other touches that play with elements from Greek mythology. The smith who makes the sacrificial knife is lame in one leg, like the god of the forge, Hephaestus. The Singer, who recounts episodes from several famous myths, including Jason and the Argonauts, is nearly blind, like the legendary Homer. The Singer functions as a kind of primitive CNN by also composing songs about the leaders of the army assembled at Aulis. His service to political propaganda offers a clue to the novel's title. As Calchas puts it, "People intent on war always need a story and the singer always provides one."

Unsworth's decision to give his characters modern vocabularies and syntax is understandable, for the sake of a fluid narrative, though his choice of some jarring anachronisms ("nervous breakdowns," "mot juste," "cost-effectiveness") is puzzling until you consider that it underscores the contemporary relevance of his tale. So too does the human-devised struggle between the god of the dominating macho faction, Zeus, and the goddess Artemis, who is deemed to have sent the wind out of sympathy for the innocent victims of the impending war. Unsworth manages to accomplish at least two things: write an entertaining historical novel and make a pointed commentary about the reasons and ways that politicans today lie to us at every turn: "It is the stories told by the strong, the songs of the kings, that are believed in the end."

And it should be read with that in mind. Anyone looking for traditionally classical fiction will find something different here. Unsworth isn't trying to convince anyone that he's writing this with historical accuracy, with true dialogue of the times, with a complete honoring of the ancient myth. I'd argue that no writers on classical subjects can ever achieve those things, so best have fun with the material. Unsworth does this like nobody I've read before. It's biting at times about the means of gaining and keeping power, manipulation of the media, explotation of superstitions, etc, etc. All things we should be very aware of today. The author is more writing about our present situations than he is writing about ancient Greeks, but this is appropriate also. We're modern readers, aren't we? The world of the ancients is gone and all that we can do is look back at them and see bits and pieces of ourselves. Don't read this if you lack a sense of humor. Do read it if you like the classical world but want something a little different, satyrical and wry and slightly irreverent.

What a great concept for a novel, a modern retelling of Greek myth with more detail, "The Song of the Kings" is about King Agamemnon and his sacrifice of Iphigenia at the outset of the Trojan/Greek war. The story is chiefly told through the eyes of three characters - Odysseus cast here as a clever politically ambitious manipulator, Calchas an Asian priest of Apollo and soothsayer to the king, and Sisipyla a slave that Iphigenia received as a present years before. Through the character of the Singer many tales of gods and goddesses are worked into the book.

A group of Greek rulers, among them Achilles and Ajax, and their troops are sailing to war with Troy under the command of Agamemnon, ostensibly to avenge the insult to Menelaus, brother to Agamemnon, whose wife Helen was "abducted" by Paris the Trojan prince. Strong winds are sent pinning the Greek fleet in harbor and an oracle reveals that the only way to appease the angry goddess who sent the winds is for Agamemnon to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia and deceives his wife Clytemnestra by telling her their daughter is going to be married.

Barry Unsworth is able to make this story come alive for the modern reader, even relevant to our times, though this is somewhat overdone. A few of the references made me cringe, like ".....fight a war without collateral damage." or ".....bound to look impressive on a person's CV." Even so, the book was enjoyable and surprisingly suspenseful considering the outcome was already known.