Troy

Tags

Achilles, Brad Pitt, British Museum, Byron, Cassandra, Chaucer, Clytemnestra, Euripedes, Euripides, Homer, Keats, Lady Hamilton, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Penguin Puffin, Pompeii, Priam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stephen Fry, Troy, Virgil

The Trojan War has for centuries (millennia, even) inspired writers and artists.  We can think of so many writers – Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles and Euripedes, as well of course as Homer and Virgil.  In our own time we can think of Margaret Atwood’s amazing Penelopiad (I wish I knew who it was I lent my copy to) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.You can see how artists have mined this great seam at the splendid Troy – Myth and Reality exhibition at the British Museum.  But hurry – it ends on 8 March.

From a jar of 530 BC showing Achilles killing the Amazon queen to a poster of Brad Pitt as the same great warrior in Troy (2004), you can see in how many different ways art has portrayed the tale of Troy.   This picture of Helen boarding Paris’ ship for Troy was once on someone’s wall in Pompeii: what does that expression on her face mean?

This wonderful bowl shows Priam begging Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body – it may well have been made in the time of Christ. We know that soldiers’ lives aren’t all danger and excitement, but there are long periods of boredom while the troops wait for something to happen. Here are Ajax and Achilles whiling away some time playing a board game.

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Hamilton’s life was lively enough without needing to call on the classics, but here she is as Cassandra (painted by George Romney).

And you shouldn’t mess with Clytemnestra – as her husband has just found out.  Look at her face and the step by her feet.  John Collier painted that.

The exhibition website is at https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/troy-myth-and-reality.

Like many others I first was taken with it as a child reading the Puffin books The Tale of Troy and Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green.  I’m now much enjoying Stephen Fry’s so readable and entertaining retelling of the Greek myths – Mythos and, my current reading, Heroes.  This doesn’t get to the Trojan War – I hope there’ll be a third volume for that.

Who Ate the Pies?

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Ben Elton, Bloomsbury, Celia Brayfield, Chaucer, Diaries of Parson James Woodforde, Duncan Sprott, Francis Spufford, George III, Golden Hill, Hampton Court, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Sir John Franklin, Upstart Crow

Ecod, methinks Master Edward hath right verily strucken a hand-wrought nail upon its noddle…

Having enjoyed Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, Ed wondered in his 8th November post how much research a historical novelist needs, and whether they should strive to use exact language and idiom. Or just wing it.

When I began my current book, set in C18 London, I spent long hours studying contemporary novelists, together with the entertaining and informative Diaries of Parson James Woodforde. I subsequently foreswore contractions, larded my first draft with the phrases and expressions of the time, and made my humble characters respectful and the educated ones God-fearing, with behaviour that was (outwardly, at least) formal. Jane Austen‘s fiction, after all, portrays an era when men and women would agree to marry before they were even on first name terms.

However, although what I’d written was comprehensible, it reminded me of having to listen to Chaucer being read out at school. It wasn’t remotely like the page-turning spiral of darker and darker mysteries that I wanted to unleash on unsuspecting agents.

I set my sights lower. After all, however much research you do, some clever clogs will spot errors. In the entertaining Upstart Crow, Shakespeare‘s dad complained that the pastry of his pie was hard and inedible. When visiting the kitchens of Hampton Court recently, I was told the delicious-looking pies on display weren’t what they seemed. They were flour and water shells, designed to cook and tenderise meat. After being broken open, they were thrown away. Did Ben Elton realise this? Does it matter? I suspicion (thought I’d throw in some archaic language) that the destitute of the day would have been glad to gnaw on them. After all, didn’t Sir John Franklin eat his own boots when starving in the Arctic in the C19?

As my husband reminds me, a historical novel is a work of fiction. I clearly shouldn’t have suffragettes throwing themselves in front of George III’s coach, or adventurers sailing to New York in a week. But, as long as the things I write could possibly have happened, my fingers are crossed. Sufficient facts important to my plot are true. I have British Library references to prove it.

Top flight historical novelists like Hilary Mantel do, of course, adopt a scholarly approach, but lesser mortals like myself can hopefully settle for something more modest.

 

(Anyone attempting this genre could do no better than invest in Bloomsbury‘s Writing Historical Fiction, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott)