Reviewed by Clare Clark
Sunday, August 13, 2006; BW05
HELEN OF TROY
A Novel
By Margaret George
Viking. 611 pp. $27.95
Margaret George has never shied away from big subjects. Previous studies for her particular brand of fictionalized autobiography have included Henry VIII, Cleopatra and Mary Magdalene. In this door-stopper of a novel, her subject is Helen of Troy. It's an ambitious choice. Even by George's standards, Helen's story is unusually crammed with plot and players, both mortal and divine. When you consider that one of the secondary characters, King Priam of Troy, had 50 sons, the immensity of this canvas becomes clear.
The novel is slow to start, spending too much time on Helen's childhood and relying on awkward dialogue to fill in vital information. But with the arrival of the seductive Paris, for whom Helen leaves her kingdom and her family, the pace picks up. In the main, George controls this convoluted story well, deftly ordering the swarm of men and gods that crowd her pages. Displaying the extent of her meticulous research, the set pieces are particularly impressive: The battles are fresh and vivid, and the inevitably numerous funeral ceremonies that follow are alive with engaging detail.
But in choosing Helen as her subject, George has given herself a number of difficulties to surmount, and she is not always successful. Helen's story, which George must work within, is littered with illogic. Curses, prophesies and tricks of the gods all intervene to ensure that characters behave unreasonably or against type. As Paris says to Hector, "You know our destiny is determined at birth and no man can change his." But George is reluctant to accept this limitation. In an afterword, she writes that she has "chosen to act as though they are all real and truly lived, and we have just lost the official identity papers confirming this." To manage this and lend her story sufficient pace, she has to fudge the issue of whether or not her characters can control their own fates, with the result that they frequently fail to convince.
This problem is greatest in the case of Helen herself. By deserting her husband, daughter and kingdom for a boy of 16 and thereby engendering one of history's bloodiest wars, Helen does not easily endear herself to a modern audience. But George is unwilling to let us dislike her. She therefore glosses over the question of maternal abandonment by making Helen's young daughter, Hermione, left at home in Sparta, complicit in her own desertion. Later in the book, George lets Helen atone in the space of a few sentences for the suicide of her mother and the sacrifice to the gods of her sister Iphigenia -- both direct results of Helen's actions. Helen's story is so riven with calamity that George cannot allow her the pages to grieve for every tragedy that befalls her, but by attempting to lend Helen a modern sensibility, the author invites a modern assessment of a mythical heroine. Helen does not emerge with honor.
More frustratingly, we never get a proper sense of what it meant to possess the face that famously launched a thousand ships. Helen of Troy was defined primarily by a beauty so devastating that it unleashed terrible tragedy. In an age when women pay to have their faces sliced and poisoned to improve their looks, our unnatural reverence for beauty is a subject of sublime pertinence. Unfortunately, George never really tackles the question. When her father declares Helen "the most beautiful woman in the world," she derides "the hated phrase" but does not explore her ambivalence about her looks. "Imagine all that anyone ever talked about was your face," she says. "Would you not want to be recognized for something else?" But George never pursues what that something else might be.
Nor do we get a sense of how Helen is changed when, by illness or magic, her beauty is temporarily taken from her. When she disguises herself as an old woman on the voyage to Troy, we get no sense of her altered status. She shows neither alarm nor anger at her sudden invisibility and powerlessness. When her hair falls out in chunks, she finds it tiresome, but it in no way threatens her sense of self. In her 20 years in Troy, she never once muses upon the alterations wrought by time upon beauty and upon love.
There are some tantalizing moments here. When Helen is received by the townspeople of Troy, "people thronged the street, pressing so close to us the chariot had trouble passing," a neat comparison with our contemporary obsession with fame and beauty. But it is not enough. At one point, someone inquires of Helen, "What is it like to be stared at, no matter what you do?" George's novel fails to provide us with a satisfactory answer. ยท
Clare Clark is the author of "The Great Stink."
