Yeah, Exactly
The Trojan Horse. What a brilliant idea, right? Sneak an army inside a guarded city as a gift made of the only raw material that could possibly handle the job: flammable wood. No way that plan could fail, right? The metaphor says it all.
“A wooden box crammed full of men—it’ll go up like a funeral pyre larded with pig fat.”
A Death
A pretty major character takes a dirt nap fairly deep into the story. The vernacular of the narration of this book is rather controversially modernistic and the narrator engages a very modern reaction to this unexpected demise: it changed everything. But then she reverts.
“No, it didn’t—it changed absolutely nothing. For the first few days it seemed as though she had just sunk beneath the waves, unnoticed, leaving not a bubble behind. I went to the women’s hut as usual, but I was aware all the time of that slim ghost flitting around the edges of the group.”
Inside the Horse
The first chapter is nothing but a description of what is taking place inside the Trojan Horse. It is an almost impossibly claustrophobic, tense, emotionally disturbing and philosophically tense. That the go-to metaphor of the modern age fits perfectly within this throwback to the classical age is not surprising:
“At first, they’re allowed rush lamps, though with the stern warning that these would have to be extinguished the minute the horse began to move. Frail, flickering lights, but yet without them the pelt of darkness and fear would have suffocated him.”
Achilles’ Ghost
Achilles is dead, but Agamemnon is acting as though he can still see him. Odysseus and others are not taking him seriously, of course, but, after all, Agamemnon is Agamemnon so has to be careful not to come right out and say what they’re all thinking. Tact among these guys is not front and center, however. They just aren’t that good at the whole nuance thing:
“`Do you still see him?’ Machaon asks. But, like Odysseus before him, he gets the tone wrong: this is the jolly-the-patient-along voice of an experienced physician. In response, Agamemnon simply stares at him until Machaon’s glad to look away.”
Helen
The story is not just about the women of Troy; that’s simply the title. Can there be anyone who thinks one of the most famous female characters in the entire history is not going to be one of those women? Helen of Troy essentially is the reason the whole Trojan War started in the first place. Or so goes the legend:
“People believed—or at least affected to believe—that whenever she cut a thread in her wool, a man died on the battlefield. I wondered, now, if she’d known that’s what people were saying—and, if so, whether it had frightened her as much as it ought to have done. Every death in the war laid at Helen’s door.”
