Book Review: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Bringing a new found family perspective to the story of the greatest Greco-Roman mythology superhero.

When I wrote my review of Stephen Fry’s Troy in 2022, I had imagined it to be an endpoint to a boomlet of books interpreting and reinterpreting Greek mythology from a variety of perspectives. Little did I know that Fry himself has a new book in his series, but more importantly, and germane to this review, John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) would step up to the plate of tackling and interpreting Greek mythology. And, what's more, take the biggest of swings to the most famous hero of Greek mythology in the process.

And so we come to his second novel, Wearing the Lion.

If you are at all familiar with anyone in Greek mythology, you probably know something about Heracles (or, if you want to go Roman, Hercules). Having a TV series devoted to him in the 1990’s certainly helped. His labors come up (even if why he had to do the labors sometimes is fuzzy in the minds of many people). His prodigious strength, certainly is the stuff of legend. He is really is the OG superhero of Classical western literature.

 
And then there is of course the monsters in Heracles' story, where Wiswell comes in.

In many stories of his even before his breakout novel, John Wiswell has been writing and thinking about monsters¹. Monsters are one of his core themes and ideas and exploring monsters, from the inside as well as out, is one of his strongest power chords. And Heracles’ story, let’s face it, is positively littered with monsters. Nearly all of his labors are capturing or killing something monstrous. Probably, the most famous of these is the Nemean Lion, the one whose hide is impenetrable to weapons. How do you defeat a monstrous carnivore you can’t hurt with a spear or a sword? In the main line of the myth, Heracles wrestles it to defeat, uses its own claws and teeth to cut the hide, and then wears it for the rest of his life as some rather good light armor.

 
Wiswell comes up with a rather different idea, and hence the book’s title and the throughline for the book. Why would Heracles, himself a monster in some ways, not seek to befriend monsters rather than to slay them? And what does that do to his myth and story? The Nemean Lion is the first, but far from the only monster that Heracles meets and befriends in the course of the narrative. Heracles is not afraid of a fight, or of war, but this is a Heracles that would rather make a friend. Again, and again. Wearing the Lion is not an act of violence... it is an act of love.

The book alternates point of view between Heracles and Hera. You might be familiar that in most myths, Hera hates Heracles and from birth tries to kill or weaken him². Wiswell plays on the fact that while Hera hates Heracles (for being a bastard son of her philandering husband Zeus), Heracles himself is for most of the book absolutely and positively devoted to “Auntie Hera”. He takes the “Hera’s Glory” of his name (that is what his name means) and hits that theme again and again. This imbalance between a Heracles who is always trying to live up to his divine stepmother and be worthy of her, not knowing she is seeking his downfall, drives a lot of the plot, and some of the more mordant humor of the book. There is the damoclean sword hanging over the narrative--what happens when Heracles finds out what Hera really thinks of him?

 
But the book begins lightly and sprightly enough, in a style that I’ve come to associate with Wiswell’s writing. It almost, I think, strays over to being twee. The conversational tone of the chapters contributes to this, as we often have Heracles, or Hera, talking to (or even more often addressing ) another character in the chapter. The second person point of view gets a workout in this novel and uses it frequently

For all of that rather light tone at the beginning, though, Wiswell is willing to go dark, and in fact to tell his story has to go dark.. I should not have been entirely surprised given his short fiction but there is definitely a gear shift in this book, before and after the death of his children. I had wondered, being relatively familiar with the Heracles story, how Wiswell was going to go there, since he changes a lot of the rest of his labors and background. But indeed, Heracles does in fact kill his three children thanks to a bout of divine madness. What had started as a relatively light Heracles and the monsters story shifts into a more serious and somber tone with less humor and more drama. Heracles of course wants to know why this happened, convinced some god must have done this, and so the rest of his narrative shifts to the quest to find that out.

There is also good work on the theme of identity and who you are. The fact that one of Heracles’ early names Alcides is used again and again, and Heracles reverts to that name when he feels no longer worthy of the name Heracles. This reminds me of Doctor Who’s The War Doctor, stripping himself of the title Doctor, and having in his own mind to re-earn and regain the right to use that name. Lots of Wiswell’s characters at some point have crises or have to come to terms with who they are and their nature. His take on Heracles is another in that spirit and mode.

Meantime, on the other side, Hera has reconsiderations of the fallout of what she has done. A strong beat Wiswell hits again and again is that Hera is Goddess of the Family. Families, especially pregnant mothers but all families in general, are her divine mandate. And instead of killing Heracles with the madness, she wound up killing his family instead³. Coming to terms with all that and what happens next, along with Heracles’ own quests, makes up the back portion of the book. And as Heracles befriends more monsters and completes more quests, the eventual conflict of Hera’s plans and Heracles’ own quest head toward inexorable conflict.

 
So the novel is really in the end about Heracles and his found family of monsters and how they intersect with Hera and her family of gods and goddesses. There is a lot of lovely bits set on Olympus with Hera and the parts of the Olympian pantheon we see--in particular Ares and Athena, although a couple of others come in as well. A criticism I might have for the book is that a few opportunities were definitely missed on this side of the equation, especially with Hera given the divine mandate of motherhood and family being an important theme of the novel. Demeter and Persephone for instance, aren’t even named. The wrangling between the deities we do get and see, however is gold, and their squabbling never gets old⁴. The novel really is, from Hera’s perspective, the slow realization that Heracles’ group of monsters with him are, in fact, a family. Heracles’ story is the slow realization of his own nature, what he did, and coming to terms with himself. And, not to bury the lede, learning to actually accept his family for and what they are.

 
Wearing the Lion shows off John Wiswell’s talents for humanizing and making monsters into people and again, like his first novel, showing that people can often be the real monsters of society. This book doesn’t quite hit that theme as hard as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, this novel though is much more about building and creating a found family...and accepting them and accepting them and their love into you, as much as you loving them. Heracles gets the latter part right off... but he (and Hera) need to learn the first half of that equation matters, too.

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Highlights:

• Interesting take on the Heracles myth exploring his relationship with Hera in a new way
• Strong theme of found family of monsters
• At turns funny, mordant, and without warning, will tear your heart out (a John Wiswell book in other words)

Reference: Wiswell, John, Wearing the Lion, [DAW 2025]

¹Dream conversation at a con or literary event ? Get John Wiswell to talk to Surekha Davies (author of Humans A Monstrous History) about monsters. That’s box office gold. 

²As Fry notes in his books, though, there are a multiplicity of varieties and variants to Greek mythology. Heracles' story is no exception and in fact, he was enormously popular across the Mediterranean. Heracles is actually Hera’s chosen champion in Etruscan mythology and we get none of the “try and kill him” business.

³In this version of the myth, Hercules kills his children but not his wife, who remains loyal to him and important to his redemption. Is that “correct” to the myth? See footnote 2.

⁴Allow me once again to lament the cancellation of KAOS, with Greek Gods set in the Modern Day. 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

TV Review: Kaos Season 1

A modern-day reimagining of the ancient Greek gods works spectacularly well in a way that has the the vision of Homer, the aesthetics of Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, and the toxic family dynastic dynamics of Succession. (Spoiler-free)

Sing to me, O muse, of the latest Netflix show, which blew away nearly all of my expectations. Many were the episodes that left me in awe or screaming at the screen.

In 2018, I played Assassin's Creed: Odyssey for a solid six months, and it revived in me an Ancient Greek renaissance. I devoured as much content as I could about my favorite world. I read Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles and Circe, and I bought every second-hand old copy of Greek myths I could find. I even made a hat with Athena's owl on the front. 

So needless to say, I'm a fan of Olympian deities. 

This new series, the brain child of Charlie Covell, sets our favorite gods in modern day Greece, complete with cars, phones, yachts that only Poseidon could afford (and who could also most likely fend off those orcas taking down ships these days). 

I know what you're thinking — another cliched "modern-day retelling" rehash. 

This one's different. It's incredible. 

The characters and their portrayals are truly entrancing and worth watching 

I haven't seen a show so well-cast in years — it's literally a who's-who for TV and movie fans from the past 30 years. In addition to the bigger names I've listed below, there's also a ton of "oh THAT guy!" moments. 

For example: Oh you want the guy who played Stannis Baratheon? Got you. How about Remis Lupin? I'll throw him in along with Frank from Station Eleven.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, is the all-mighty Zeus, and he perfectly captures the insecure, bombastic, and slightly pathetic characteristics of the king of the gods. He's actually playing against type in Kaos, and you don't get the typical "Life, uh, finds a way" moments of Goldblum-ness that usually pop up in his works. 

Janet McTeer is Hera, Zeus' wife and arguably one of the show's most interesting characters — let alone one of the most interesting and powerful portrayals of Hera I've ever witnessed. 

Debi Mazar plays Medusa, everyone's favorite Gorgon. She is so effortlessly cool and intense, and she keeps her snakes under a head scarf to not intimidate people. 

Eddie/Suzy Izzard is one of the three fates — the women in charge of the destiny of every living being. As a fan of Izzard's standup, this was just truly magical to watch.

World-building that rivals the slick and ready feel the John Wick movies

Creating a believable universe for our pantheon of gods to inhabit isn't exactly easy, and even traditional depictions of them have been a bit sparse on the actual domestic details. Yes, Zeus wears a toga and is usually an old white man with gray hair. Mount Olympus, their lofty home, seems more like a big, Grecian-columned room en plein-air more than anything, though. 

Not so with Kaos. Olympus is a sprawling magnificent Italianate villa, even featuring the palace where parts of Naboo from The Phantom Menace were shot. The gods are waited on by dutiful, tennis-attired ball boys. 

Down on Earth, though, there's even more fun stuff. Hera has an entire line of nuns called tacitas that are tongueless (not unlike the avoxes in The Hunger Games) who hear confessions from humans. She can access these confessions right from a room off her bedroom in Olympus, because Hera is a freak.

I could go on and on with the smallest of details — from a box of Spartan Crunch cereal to the fact that Eurydice and Orpheus live in a place called Villa Thrace — because this show is so well done. And if you're a Greek myth nerd, it will definitely demand rewatching. 

Tapping into the emotional truth of mythic characters but straying from actual retellings

Showrunner Covell definitely takes some liberties with the characters and their backstories, but always in service of making things more interesting. For example, Medusa isn't in fact dead, slayed by Perseus, but instead is a middle manager down in the underworld. 

Charon, the lonesome ferryman of the river Styx, was once in love with that fire-stealing upstart Prometheus. This show is so delightfully queer in many ways, and actually features a transman portraying a transman, something Hollywood doesn't always get right. 

So yes, there's lot of little things like this, but I think they truly add to the show rather than take away anything. Covell uses the entire history of Greek myth more like a sandbox, a place in which to grab characters and build them into something interesting and compelling in service of the narrative. It works.

It's got all the big themes that have been making stories entertaining for millenia

The plot revolves around three humans — Ariadne, Orpheus, and Eurydice — and how their fates are intertwined with those of the gods. Zeus has been losing his mind over a prophecy that he believes will have him unseated. There's also familial drama that rivals the Roys in Succession, except that instead of being spoiled and unhinged billionaires, they're literally spoiled and unhinged mighty deities. 

Zeus is still screwing around on Hera, and Dionysus is the prototypical party boy, but it feels a lot more real to modern viewers when it takes place in contemporary Greece. The setting may have changed, but the story hasn't. 

The importance and inevitability of fate is what drives Kaos, though, and it's woven superbly throughout nearly every scene in the season. After the last episode, I literally screamed with pure delight. I cannot wait for the next season. 

Mainly because Athena, my all-time favorite character in Greek myth, wasn't in this season.

I'm telling myself it's because they're going to cast Phoebe Waller-Bridge as her next time. 

Go watch it! 

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The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: I couldn't have imagined a more perfect cast; the soundtrack is superb, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elastica, the Kills, and more; it makes me want to re-dive into my love of Greek myth.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: Seven Against Thebes by Stephen Dando-Collins

Stephen Dando-Collins’ Seven Against Thebes brings the original and once ubiquitously famous story to new audiences and readers

Seven Heroes, coming together to face a tyrant and his forces. You think you’ve heard this story before, or watched it.  Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven. And many variants.  But most of those stories (with one major exception, which I will discuss later) have the Seven coming together in defense, defending a group of innocents against an incoming force.  But the original story of seven heroes coming together is a somewhat different story. A story of a king wrongly deposed by his brother, and managing to gather a force of champions and soldiers to assault the city he once called home and to gain his birthright back. A city that in modern day is not as famous as Athens or Sparta, but was, once, their equal...

This is Stephen Dando-Collins’ story in SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven.

Once upon a time, 2500 years ago, the story of Polynices and his fellow Champions was one of the core stories of Greek History and Myth.  The Iliad and Odyssey you, reader, probably already know. And you know that even beyond those two texts themselves, the stories and myths of the Iliad and Odyssey had been adapted in plays, stories, and other works in Ancient Greece and Rome, and of course, all the way up to today. 

The story of the Seven Against Thebes was, for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the co-equal of the Iliad and Odyssey, once inspired numerous plays and other works based on the events. The Theban Cycle was once as big a deal as anything by Homer. But while the Iliad and Odyssey have proved immortal, the story of the war against Thebes lost its luster and cultural consciousness except for it’s origin point, and the general idea of a band of heroes fighting together (which Kurosawa and Sturges would bring, and flip from offense to defense).  Dando-Collins’ goal here is to bring the original story back to light, for new readers and present a story whose original is perhaps unjustly obscure in a new and modern light.

The author takes a strictly historical fictional tack in the novel right from the beginning of the story. While a lot of the plays and fiction written around these events in the time of the Greeks and Romans had the action replete with Gods and Monsters and the like, Dando-Collins takes a tack that the characters certainly believed in the Gods and act (often very strongly) on their religious beliefs, Zeus, Athena, Hera and the rest of their family do not appear on stage at all.  

So where does the story of Seven Against Thebes begin, in Dando-Collins’ retelling? Well, as I mentioned before, this is the part of the story that you almost certainly know.  Who has not heard of the man who, unknowingly, slew his father and married his mother?  Yes, the start of the story of the war against Thebes begins with none other than Oedipus.  Just why Oedipus did these things are presented in a Historical fictional point of view. While in the original sources, Oedipus was cursed by the Gods to do all this, it is in the end a series of tragic circumstances, and it all begins with a chance encounter on the road. Oedipus, who has been raised far away from his birth home as a foundling, gets into a deadly encounter with his father (not that he had a clue who it was) and proceeds from there to Thebes, the populace unknowing that he killed the King of the city. But they do know he is a big damn hero and so they marry him to the widowed Queen Jocasta, who is indeed his mother, their blood relationship unknown to either at the time.1

I can hear the record scratch. Big Damn Hero? Hero of what? Well, it turns out you may not have realized it, but Oedipus did defeat a monster, or so he claimed was a monster, in a riddling contest.  A monster called the Sphinx. And yes, the classic riddle whose answer is “A Man”.  Again, given the historical fictional perspective, Dando-Collins speculates that the Sphinx was just a woman who was a dangerous robber, nothing more, not that anyone knew that. Defeating the Sphinx is certainly more Heroic than a single female bandit, right?  (Later on, during the actual war, Dando-Collins has a couple of soldiers argue whether the Sphinx was real or was, in fact, just a bandit)

So, Oedipus and Jocasta ruled Thebes for a time, until drought and famine had them seek answers from the Oracle of Delphi as to why and how to solve it.  The results of that led to the two finding out the long buried truth about themselves and what had happened. Oedipus blinds himself and flees Thebes. 1 This leaves Oedipus and Jocasta’s two sons, Polynices and Etoceles. They decide that they should share the throne, ruling in alternate years. In a move that everyone with the sense of a dazed dormouse should have seen coming, the moment Etoceles takes the seat, he banishes his brother. 

And so the Seven Against Thebes gets its defining motivation. Polynices winds up at the court of King Adrastus in the city of Argos.  Along with another royal exile from a different city, Tydeus, he cools his heels for a while, but is always dreaming of the chance to go and wrest control of the city from his no-good brother.  Finally, a plan is hatched by Polynices and Tydeus to get their thrones back, by finding and gathering a group of companions, going together to liberate Thebes, and then go on to liberate Calydon on behalf of Tydeus. (And Adrastus, who would get lots of prestige by having the two cities beholden to him for his help, sees this all as a good investment in money and manpower)

As you can see, Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven and its kin usually have our Heroes defending the weak, training the helpless and playing defense for an incoming force, but the original source text is all about an assault on Thebes. L.R. Lam and Elizabeth’s May SEVEN DEVILS, though, does take inspiration from the original source text, having their heroes go on the offense against an oppressive Empire. And the former Heir to the Empire is one of the Seven, continuing the theme of having someone connected intimately to the ruler as part of the attacking party.  

But there is a note of heroism in fighting against a corrupt space Empire in Seven Devils, that Seven Against Thebes, as told by Dando-Collins, lacks. The reasons why the Seven get recruited and join Polynices’ quest to become King of Thebes are varied but are relatively mercenary--be it in terms of material wealth, or glory. This does have the knock on effect, I think, for a modern reader like me to sympathize with the Seven a little less than I would with a more modern tale. Polynices got a raw deal, to be sure, thanks to his brother, but this is not an altruistic campaign by any means for any of the others. 

When the actual marching and fighting occur, Dando-Collins, who has written on ancient armies and combats, really does shine. He looks at the logistics of marching and the terrain the army has to traverse, and the set pieces of the conflict. He shows a mix of individual combats a la the Iliad with army actions on a larger scale as the forces led by each of the Seven face off against the Seven gates of Thebes. He goes into loving detail on how Thebes was arranged and defended and the heroism on both sides of the conflict (and also side quests!) plays out. It was especially, here, that I could start to see what Classical Greeks and Romans saw in the story. War, reverses, combat, heroism, tragic deaths, pathos, and much more. It’s excitingly and engagingly written. 

Especially good is how the battle plays out. It’s a method much copied in film, because it works.  If you have a group of opponents on each side, you pair them off, so that you narrow the wide screen to a series of one-on-ones. The Seven do this, by each Gate in Thebes getting a defender to hold off the member of the Seven assaulting it.  It will surprise you not at all to find that, for example, thjat the gate Polynices assaults is defended by his brother Etoceles, himself. 

There is also another bit I got to thinking in reading this. If you remember your Iliad, there were funerary games held for Hector after Achilles slew him. Here, in the course of the battles and conflicts, we get a couple of high profile deaths, and funerary games to match.  The sheer joy and exuberance the participants have in the funerary game make it clear to me that this is how the Ancient Greek Olympics must have surely started--it started out of funerary games that eventually decided to become a regular thing, without needing a funeral to have an excuse to hold them. 

The other takeaway is when this book takes place in the timeline of Greek history/myth. Given that several of the children and immediate descendants of the Seven are present at Troy, this takes place in the generation before the Trojan War.  Theseus is contemporary to the Seven. One of the Seven is the son of Atalanta, the Huntress of the Calydonian Boar. If we mix myth and history for a moment, the Seven are the penultimate crop of heroes in Greek Mythology. After them, we get the Trojan War and the end of Mythic, Heroic Greece. Mythic Greece fades away into real history.2  Perhaps since they are the second closest to real history and also are less myth-touched than earlier generations of heroes like Heracles, Bellerophon, and the like, the Seven were and are more relatable as real people by readers and storytellers alike. 

If you are looking for a mythic, magic, here, this is not the rendition of the story that you want. Dando-Collins is relentlessly materialistic, attributing everything to men or to chance, and the Gods and magic play no part in his story. He fashions this mythic story into historical fiction of the first order, readable, immersive and a great look at larger than life characters and their epic and immense struggle.  This is source material and inspiration that more authors could mine for their own ideas. 

And if you want to learn more about Thebes, the city that was neither Athens nor Sparta but just as important, back in the day, let me commend to you Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, by Paul Cartledge. He does briefly touch on the Theban cycle events before going on to written history of the city.

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Highlights: 

• Epic storytelling grounded in the real.
• A real spotlight on a story whose details have faded from public consciousness

1. This is too big a digression to avoid putting elsewhere than a footnote, so here goes. The Oedipal complex has nothing to do really with Oedipus. He had no idea he killed his father, and married his mother. And as I said in the main text, once he and she find out the truth, it is with horror, revulsion and repulsion that this truth comes out, not any sort of secret desire like in Freud. Oedipus’ story is of tragedy of circumstance, not any sort of lusting after one’s parent. 

2. And yes I am sort of thinking of Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, here. 

Dando-Collins, Stephen, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven. (Turner, 2023)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Knights of the Zodiac is an exactly acceptable fight movie

Many punches are exchanged by all

One doesn't go to watch a fight movie expecting great themes. One wants visually interesting choreography and physically believable acrobatics. By that standard, Knights of the Zodiac just about delivers.

The plot is the same you remember from the 1986 anime series: the Greek goddess Athena has reincarnated as a human girl, and a team of supernatural fighters is recruited to defend her from the other gods and their minions. Through the ensuing brawls, our protagonist, the Pegasus knight Seiya, exemplifies the virtues of tenacity, loyalty and courage. This setup is simple enough for any viewer to follow through the 114 episodes of the series. Seiya and his brothers-in-arms meet progressively stronger enemies, grow stronger in turn, and keep the world safe. There isn't much else to the story.

Where the anime stood out was in its art style. There are only so many ways you can draw ambiguously teenaged soldiers punch the guts out of each other, so these fights are colored with ethereal halos and the ocassional psychic attack. Of course, the most visually interesting part of the show was the way armors could rearrange their pieces around a knight's body; this detail was a small bit of Transformers-like appeal that kept the continuous punches from getting tiresome.

Unfortunately, this movie adaptation discards what made the show visually unique. Its armors look generic, lackluster, boring. This is not entirely the movie's fault; it is inherently hard to translate the stylized expressiveness of hand-drawn shōnen animation into the real faces of human actors. Compare these two images, supposed to represent the same character:

With obviously digital choreographies rendered in videogame quality, Knights of the Zodiac fails to provide the thrills of the cartoon. Seemingly aware of this shortcoming, what the movie lacks in artistry it attempts to compensate for with drama. The family dynamics of the girl destined to awaken as the goddess Athena hint toward themes of motherhood, abandonment, resentment, and broken trust, and their dramatic resolution is just adequate enough. We're not here to complicate the human experience; we're here to watch sparks fly.

However, we've watched these sparks before. It's bizarre that Famke Janssen was cast for this movie and put in a costume that calls back to her days as Jean Grey, when the heroic climax of Knights of the Zodiac retreads the ending of X-Men 3, only with less stabbing. This obvious reference is too distracting and detracts from the supposed seriousness of the moment.

On the whole, Knights of the Zodiac is a not-too-bad adaptation, with fight scenes that keep the eyes busy and the mind switched off. It leaves space open for sequels, because of course everything must now, but in its own right, it is just about OK.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review [Book]: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

Wrath Goddess Sing is exactly what a myth retelling ought to be, twisting the original narrative to make it into something new and fascinating.

Cover art by Marcela Bolivar

A note on pronouns: in this book, Achilles is a trans woman. I use female pronouns for her when referring to the Achilles of the story, but occasionally refer to myth-Achilles as “he”, as is the case in original texts. I do my best to differentiate these so as not to misgender the Achilles of the book.

This is possibly one of the best Greek myth retellings I have encountered in the last five years. It works well on so many levels, but critically, it succeeds on two main criteria. First, it reinvests Greek myth with a sense of wonder, mystery and mysticism. Greek myth has become slightly prosaic to a lot of readers, just stories, familiar ones that we learn as children, so well-trodden as to be unremarkable, and by making the war among the gods cryptic and inhuman, Deane has reinvigorated the mythical atmosphere the stories must originally have had, and which is sometimes palpable but just out of reach when reading the original texts as a modern reader.

Secondly, she has taken something about the myth we know and twisted it, to show us the story same but different. What if? She asks. What then?

Her story centres around Achilles, but not always the Achilles we know already – her Achilles is a trans woman. In some of the original stories, myth-Achilles disguises himself as a woman and hides on Skyros, in an attempt to escape his fate, as it has been foretold that if he fights in the Trojan War, he’ll die young but live on in glory forever, but if he avoids the fight, he will live a long, undistinguished, but happy life. In these stories, he is found out of his disguise by Odysseus, fights in the war, and we all know how it ends. However, Deane’s what if is simply this – what if Achilles wasn’t “disguised” as a woman? What if, on Skyros, she was simply being allowed to live as the woman she always had been, but had been denied the opportunity to embrace? And obviously this has some effect on the character of Achilles as we see her, in contrast to myth-Achilles. She has the arrogance, the rage, the impulsive emotionality, but she also a different view on some aspects of the world, a cautious, sometimes regretful empathy, that when sparked can burn with the same passion as anything myth- or book-Achilles ever cares about. This additional lens on her life also gives an extra layer of explanation to an aspect that has always been part of Achilles’ character – an almost resentful attitude to the world, a fuck-you to it all, a determination to take whatever she can get out of it and the rest be damned – because book-Achilles lives in a world that, originally, refused to accept the person she knew herself to be, and now that they have, she’s not going to let any of them forget it.

Because the book is so centred on Achilles, as so many retellings of the Iliad are, it somewhat lives or dies on how well you get on with her character. In my opinion, this is one of the best interpretations of Achilles as a real, flawed and complicated human that I’ve seen in literature. Her Achilles is raging, arrogant and glorious, god-blessed and fate-touched (whether blessing or curse), just as the Achilles of myth. She is an untouchable demon with the spear, and spares no enemy in the heat of battle. She’s conflicted, self-contradictory, violent, a pain in the arse, vibrant, passionate, deeply caring and full of a rage that will bend the world before her. She’s not a nice person. She’d be a terrible person if she weren’t also incredibly charismatic. You can see, almost immediately, why people hate her and love her in equal measure.

And we get to see the people who love her show us, in detail, why they do so. And in these, there are a great many changes from the stories we know, too, but all the changes feel so thoughtful and deliberate, and they each bring something new to the table. Some people are lovers who we might not expect to see in that regard. Some aren’t who we might have thought to see. And Deane has done something which I find really valuable to see in reinterpretations of Achilles’ story – she’s made her Achilles… I’m going to say bisexual for ease of reference, but perhaps it would be more apt to say that the Achilles of the book has a sexuality more reflective of the different sexual landscape of the ancient world, which is something I really appreciate seeing.

Aside from the characters (and there are plenty of characters who are either entirely new or existing mythological ones who’ve been taken a quarter turn away from our expectations, and all are wonderful), Deane has put an immense amount of work into building her setting. She has drawn on a world that is not Ancient Greece alone, but a Mediterranean connected, by marriage and trade and custom and treaty, linking Greece and its islands with Egypt, the Hittites, the Amazons and more. They speak some of each others’ languages, bear old bonds of friendship, and critically, travel. Troy/Wilusa isn’t just a singular, far off place to go for war and nothing more - it’s a nexus on a complex map, whose alliances and enmities and neutralities matter to the story. The Egypt of the book is a land of rituals and magic - Egypt as seen through the eyes of the ancient Greeks.

That being said, there are anachronisms; an Egyptian princess describes herself as an ethnographer. But they are cheerful, breezy ones, knowing and deliberate, and offhandedly modern statements like Patroclus declaring the Achaians “shit linguists” go hand in hand with the authentically batshit, like trying to decipher and learn the language of dolphins. I can totally see that coming up as an aside in a bit Herodotus. It feels historically very real.

I’m not talking about strict “accuracy”, which is a complex beast in many ways, but instead creating a coherent historical context in which to set the book. While I do value accuracy in historical novels, as soon as you start writing about myth, that accuracy becomes an impossible dream. And so instead, what I value in what Deane has done is the use of historical details – drawing on texts outside of the Iliad like the Milawata letter – to give us a sense of a real place and a real time in which the events might have happened, and to give us lines between characters and historical figures that might be drawn, and might be interesting. It doesn’t have to be true, or accurate, but it has to be plausible and coherent, and at that, Deane has succeeded admirably. Do I think, in a historical sense, that Tyndareus of myth and the Hittite Tudhaliya IV were the same person? No, probably not. But it is neat. It is interesting. In the same way, Deane has changed orthography or implied language-background of some of the names, in ways that might not be strictly true, but they are interesting, and they feed into the feeling she’s giving us for the setting. It works, for the story as we are given it, for the thesis of this interconnected, mythically linked world. And when we’re operating in a mythological, rather than historical, space, it gives us something cool to play with, that serves the story in a way that feels authentic enough. Because there are no truly right answers, in mythology, just the ones that work, the ones that feel like they sing to the facts and stories we know, and catch the same tune, or harmonise, in a way that makes something beautiful.

When we step away from the more “historical” aspects, and look into the divine in her book, Deane has strayed much further from the beaten path. For all the characters’ names aren’t the norm we might be expecting, a groundedly bronze age Trojan War is at least roughly familiar. The gods and their world are less so, though still linking back at times to what we do know. On the one hand, there’s a thread of the sort of mythical thinking that is familiar to anyone who has read the stories of Ancient Greece. Dreams are full of portents, the gods act directly upon the world but their actions are cryptic and strange, sometimes decisive action that affects mortals, sometimes more in the way of omen to be interpreted. Sometimes both. When a ship founders at sea in a storm, is this the gods making their displeasure known, or simply an accident mortals seek to explain? This is known, though Deane does choose to play it up a little harder than is the choice of some retellings.

However, she also tinkers with the hierarchical arrangement of the gods, which brings in some real change, and makes things both simpler and more complex. There are fewer factions with fewer interests brought to bear on the conflict, but they’re not the ones we expect, or where we expect to find them, so we’re left wrong-footed. Achilles is no longer the child of Thetis, a sea goddess who helps throughout the story. Instead, she is the daughter of a mortal woman, Thetis, wife of Peleus, who died in childbirth, and also the daughter of Athena, the Silent One, whose power touches her life and her dreams. Deane conflates the patroness Athena, the Athena who grabs Achilles’ hair in myth to prevent an outburst that would anger Agamemnon, with the more directly patronly and motherly Thetis - again, simpler, but leaving some mystery for us to puzzle at as the story progresses. The story gives us not just Achilles’ life, but also insights into the birth, genealogy, history and very nature of the gods in Deane’s universe, all of which is increasingly strange as the plot progresses. If a reader comes in expecting a faithful reworking of the familiar, this will be a disappointment, but in terms of how it affects the telling of the story, the way the world of the gods is connected up, and how Achilles’ arc progresses, I think all of the choices we see are clearly thoughtful ones, and ones which work together to sell that intensely mystical quality to her divine world. It’s a divine world which evokes the same feelings as Orphic cults – bone-deep strange and deeply numinous.

The divine also draws on the mundane and the historical, in a way I found deeply pleasing – her gods, in her grounded, Bronze Age setting, are weak to “star-metal”, meteoric iron, in a way that seems to signal the shift from a heroic age towards the historic, from a world where gods act on the lives of men and women, to the age we know as verifiable.

And then there’s Helen – character and myth all in one. Helen is… a problem, in Trojan War retellings. How do we balance acknowledging her agency or lack of it with her culpability, or lack of it. Is she victim or perpetrator? Is she the architect of her fate, does she want a war, does she love Paris in truth, or is she merely a prize in a competition over an apple thrown by Strife? For every retelling, all the way back to the Greeks themselves, there is a difference answer to this problem. Deane has solved it by superseding it - Helen does not become a prize because of an apple thrown by Strife… Helen is the apple, and the prize, and strife, all together. She is complicit and she is a pawn. Like much in the book, she is not tied down to one single definition, and her story and fate are just as much in flux as Achilles’, and everything else divine in the tale.

Which is not to say that the story doesn’t touch base with the one we know – the threads wander back and forth, but the key nexus points - Briseis gone to Agamemnon, Achilles’ refusal to fight, Patroclus in Achilles’ armour fighting in her place - happen, but the paths to and from then range away into the mists, becoming strange shadows of themselves. The myth is always present – it is a retelling after all – but it is a retelling in the truest sense, because the story has been reshaped in the telling to suit its needs and purposes.

In short – in a review which has been anything but – Deane has gone into the incredibly crowded field of current mythological retellings, and blown them all out of the water by doing something ambitious, powerful, meaningful and different. Her story not only recasts Achilles, but imagines a Bronze Age Mediterranean with a community of trans women – her kallai, “the beautiful ones” – and some trans men who exist in a grounded, connected and intensely mythical world that delights and enchants at every turn. While reading, you can feel the love and the research that has gone into the authenticity, while at the same time the creativity and ambition that has gone into the divergences, all of which come together to form a beautiful, coherent whole.

 --

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10 

Bonuses: +1 for the occasionally hilarious anachronistic turn of phrase, including describing Achilles’ slightly murderous warhorses as “divine horses, gods among the horse race, destroyers of their enemies, brave horses of abnormal pride and dread, good boys”

Penalties: none that I could find

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference:  Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing [HarperCollins, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview [book]: A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Natalie Haynes retells and reframes the story of the end of the Trojan War and its aftermath by grounding the story in the perspective of the women of the saga.

Sing, O Muse of the story of A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, of the sorrow of Hecube, of the determination of Andromache, of the grief filled prophecies of Cassandra, of the patience of Penelope, of the tragedy of the Amazon Penthesilea, who sought death for the horrible accident she caused. Sing O Muse, of this look at the women of the Trojan WAr by classicist Natalie Haynes.

Looking at the Trojan War and its aftermath from the women’s perspective is. In fact, not new. One of the major source materials for these books is Eurpides’ play The Trojan Women (as well as another play by him, Hecuba) among other sources and perspectives. And recent tellings and retellings of Greek Myth (such as the trilogy of Greek Myth books done by Stephen Fry) have done much better in bringing female perspectives to the myths than earlier writers and translators. What Haynes, a classical scholar, brings here is telling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath entirely from female perspectives.

The book is laid out thusly: Starting with the sack of Troy, the main narrative follows the female survivors of the Horse being pulled into the city, and their ultimate fate as chattel to be parceled out among the victorious Greeks. As the Trojan Women await and are subjected to their various fates, the narrative breaks off to other female perspectives that fill in the story both past, present and forward. So while the fate of the women inexorably comes, we divert here and there to other perspectives and stories in the entire arc. 

Thus, while we get the story of Andromache, Hecube, Cassandra and the other survivors (including, yes, Helen) and that is the core narrative, we get so much more that really reframes and reorients the events from their perspective. We get Penelope, both in the present and in the “future” (from the perspective of The Trojan Women( writing letters to Odysseus. While much of this is a recapitulation of Odysseus’ ten year voyage home, it gives us Penelope’s perspective on Odysseus and his (mis)adventures, and has some rather pointed and choice words, and deserved ones at that. Even more interesting is Calliope, who is our frame story.  Just like the Epic Poems invoke “The Muse” at the beginning, here we have the invoked Muse herself, Calliope, commenting on the narrative, commenting on the characters, the poet she is inspiring (a close reader can figure out who she is inspiring) and basically declaring that these stories WILL live on, someday. It oddly reminded me, of all things, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, and I wonder, given the author’s background, if that wasn’t deliberate. 

The lack of male points of view means that this story of the Trojan War doesn’t have much on-battle action exploits that books, movies and other media of the Trojan War focus on, and when it does describe these events, it is generally from a second hand telling of those events. The big exception of this is Penthesilea, the Amazon. Drawn to Troy because of an accidental death she has caused, we do see her and her Amazons wade into the conflict, but it is a brief affair. Haynes focuses instead on other matters in this narrative, trusting the readers will pick up what they need to frame and re-see the story.

That is a strength and something to note for this book. The question is this: Can you as a reader unfamiliar with Troy and the Trojan War follow what happened in that conflict? Yes, it’s a difficult task, and Haynes’ narrative does focus on things other than combat, and some things are just not going to come on a screen that focuses on the women. (Diomedes, who is that?). But would someone who thinks Ajax is only a kitchen cleanser connect enough with this material in order to enjoy it? That I am not so sure about. As a side matter, I find the whole idea of “assumed cultural knowledge” for some works that rely heavily on them to be a fascinating problem, especially as the focus of what is taught and emphasized changes over time. 

For readers that are more than passingly familiar with the Trojan War, though, there is a lot in this book to unpack and enjoy. It does, after all, provide perspectives that aren’t often told, and done so in a holistic way.In that way, it also reminds me of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which twists a lot of stories together to tell a long epic. Here, Haynes uses the marriage of Thetis and Peleus as its inciting incident and anchor point along with the war itself. But we go to the reasons for that marriage, through the war itself, all the way to the return of the Greeks from the Trojan War.

There is also the matter of invention and versions of myths and legends. The low level reader of Greek Myths might not be aware that a couple of the myths and legends around the Trojan War here have been changed and reinterpreted. A medium level reader of the myths and legends are going to find the differences, and may be outraged at Haynes 'inventions and decry the changes she makes. (Predictably these complaints can go hand in hand with those calling the book ‘woke’).  However, the more I’ve read Greek Myths and Legends and read about them in other texts, I’ve come to learn what full Classicists know: there is no one single canon of Greek Myths, and there are plenty of divergences, alternatives, differing versions of every Greek Myth out there. Even things like the 12 Labors of Heracles--there are some differing lists of those, and how he completed a couple of them varies. If you want a cinematic sort of look at this--look how different Perseus’ story is in the original Clash of the Titans movie and its remake.  So Haynes' own reinterpretations and changes from what you might have read as canon are ones I took in a delighted stride, seeing yet new ways to look at Greek Myth.

And that is the takeaway here. Greek Myth and Legend is an endlessly fascinating and changing kaleidoscope of stories that can be told and retold again and again (why Hollywood, in its thirst for franchises, hasn’t done a “Greek Myth Cinematic Universe” frankly BAFFLES me.) Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships provides yet a new and well written view in that kaleidoscope that only enriches and enhances the original stories and source material.

---

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 fort excellent use of female perspectives that is not “woke” but rather tells the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath in a new and engaging way.

+1 for the unexpected humor, especially in Penelope and Calliope’s chapters

Penalties: -1  Not certain the story works for those uninterested in the Trojan War.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Haynes, Natalie, A Thousand Ships [Harper, 2021]