Review of Helen of Troy by Margaret George

This is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read, but didn’t get to until now, published in 2006. Here’s a somewhat meandering review, more a collection of my reactions/thoughts than a formal review. Margaret George writes historical fiction set in a number of periods from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I. I worried from a distance that someone who jumped around like that might be skimpy on the research and historical accuracy. Then I heard her speak at the Tucson Festival of Books, and I realized she is both very smart and has a great deal of integrity about just that issue. So I approached her gigantic Helen of Troy (606pp) with interest—the period I most care about by someone who cared to do it right.

Her approach to Helen is comprehensive. She starts with Helen as a small girl and takes her all the way through the Trojan War, back to Sparta and beyond. Besides making for a long book this also makes for a slightly amorphous book. There isn’t a clear focus or drive—whatever is next up in Helen’s life, that’s what we’ll get. I don’t mean George didn’t lay out a plan, but there’s often a lack of tension and a willingness to include information and scenes just for their enjoyment and detail. I happen to like an abundance of historical information and setting detail, so that’s fine by me, but it’s not a page-turner. Her portrayal of the Mycenaean world is quite faithful to Homer for the most part, which means it isn’t always faithful to the most modern historical understanding of that place and time, but Homer is a good place to be. Her Troy is a Greek city, with only slight differences from the world of Sparta that Helen has left. The historian in me knows there’s been some updates on that—scholars no longer think the Trojans were Greek speaking, for example, nor that their material world was Mycenaean but rather closer to the Hittite cultural world to their east. But this is a mythologically based book so I’m content to immerse myself in this Greek world, which is quite vivid and does reflect pretty accurately what we know about the Mycenaeans.

The most compelling things about Helen of Troy, besides the abundance of detail of daily life and war in ancient times, are George’s character portrayals. Helen starts out quite ordinary despite her half immortal parentage, except in the area of her startling appearance. Other than golden hair, George resists telling us what makes Helen’s appearance so unusual. In this she takes her cue from Homer and paints Helen through the reactions of people to her rather than description. Helen acquires her visionary insights and her outsized passion from the gods as she goes along rather than from an inborn nature. She objects to being so special in appearance and as far as personality, she stays in normal human parameters: strong-willed at times, intelligent and perceptive about people and their faults, able to take command in times of need, but often an observer more than a doer. The magical sorceress-like character that sometimes appears in the myths and Homer is not present here except in rumors that Helen rejects.

Although Helen and Paris go through a rough spot in their marriage, George has them cleave to each other to the end. Some readers of Homer would see a Helen who has grown bored and disgusted with her Paris long before the end of the war, so that’s an interesting and conscious choice.

Achilles is pretty much despicable through and through. He’s violent and mean spirited with only one or two moments, for example in the face of Penthesileia’s death, where he shows any positive actions or feelings at all. I’ve always been partial to Achilles, seeing him as the laudable existential hero of the poem, so I’m not with George on that read, but there’s plenty in the tradition to support her portrayal and it works very well with her overall storyline. I think it does reduce Achilles and therefore the whole Trojan War aura, but her portrayal of Hector’s nobility and her redeeming of Paris make up for that. Paris is a far more heroic character here than I would have been able to imagine, and I enjoyed that vision a great deal. It was fun and made Helen’s choice far more satisfying.

George uses some clever, if occasionally a little contrived, devices to put us on the scene with some famous moments in the Iliad. The novel is told from Helen’s point of view, but she wanders in her inner vision onto battlefields, and at other points she observes private moments as an eavesdropper, such as the farewell scene between Andromache and Hector and their infant son.

The tragedy of Troy’s destruction is George’s tour de force. As a reader I felt it in my bones. I wept with Priam and Hecuba and the growing bleakness and despair is beautifully depicted. She makes you want to reach into mythological history and rewrite it, make the whole thing come out differently, even as you read along knowing no such reprieve will come. That’s good writing, for sure. The final parts in Sparta and then back to Troy have less emotional kick to them, but given her choice to portray Helen’s whole life, they are unavoidable.

I enjoyed George’s Helen of Troy. There are probably pieces here and there that could have been edited out to carry the story forward more quickly (I can hear my critique partners/editors laughing at me—that’s always what I have to do), but if you love immersion in history, George excels at that and you might object if parts were removed.