I want you to close your eyes ( fear not, this is not a mindfulness exercise!) and cast your mind to the Trojan-Greek war. What images initially pop to mind? I do not want to assume anything, though I speak for myself when I say, gold, armour, blood, and, finally men. But then I read A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, and this perception changed.
Given what war is synonymous with, I still had the image of blood and testosterone flying around the page, though there was something else added to it: the silenced struggle and eminent effort of the women of the Trojan war.
“When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.”
I absolutely love novels about Greek mythology. It is such an intricate, and complex subject, yet there is such a range of novels that you can explore to gain an insight into the mystical world. While A Thousand Ships does, no doubt, simplify the perception slightly to make the story more accessible, it maintains the beauty which this tale so desperately deserves.
Natalie Haynes cuts straight to the chase as she invites us into Troy, which finds itself at the hands of defeat. The Greeks are victorious, and Creusa of Troy is greeted with the Trojan loss as she wakes to a city embedded in tragedy. Tinged by Greek flames, the uncertainty Creusa feels as she makes her way through Troy is shared with the readers, as Natalie Haynes beckons us to take steps to discover the female efforts of the war which lay, for so long, dormant beneath the stories of the men.
Switching between female perspectives, we grow acquainted with some of the most influential women of the Trojan war. Amongst these figures are Penthesilia, the Amazon princess, an ally to the Trojans who took on Achilles himself; the Trojan women -- Hecabe, Polyxena, Cassandra, Andromache and Theano -- held captive by the Greeks, while breathing the burden of their losses; and the cunning Penelope, who sends rhetorical letters to her husband, in which she denounces his adventures as vanity-driven, offering an adroit perspective.
With these stories, Natalie Haynes invites us to question what the building blocks of a hero are. If you search up ‘hero’ on the internet, action-packed, cape-embellished images appear. However, by providing parallel scenarios involving men and women, Natalie Haynes manages to redefine the term. This word exceeds the bounds of the battlefield and action, streaking through to men and women alike. It was the women, after all, who had to bear the consequences of the idle vanities of war which lead to the loss of their loved ones.
Menelaus, husband to Helen, embodies irrationality as the loss of his wife triggers a ten-year war. Such external dependency to solve one’s problems acts as a form of antithesis to the female reaction to loss. However, Natalie Haynes also allows the women in this novel to thrive beyond tragic and domestic circumstances, representing their heroic efforts on, and off, the battlefield, and the psychological torment which haunted them beyond the scenes of armour.
A lot of the time, women are a tool in literature; a plot device to drive the vehicle of men forward. However, this novel completely diverts from this. As opposed to the women being a tool to facilitate the other happenings of this novel, they are the novel. Not only do they assert themselves in terms of their roles in the actual plot, they are interwoven within the building blocks of the novel. With each chapter falling under the name of a woman, Natalie Haynes refuses to shy away from the feminist nature of this novel. Rather, she embraces it, making it overt and inescapable. This is something that I greatly admired, and something we do not see enough.