A Thousand Ships
Alright… turns out you can have too much of a good thing.
I probably need a break from the myths for a while. I’m finding it difficult to pick up the next book, so I keep trying to go back to “easy reads” in myth and science fiction.
This was a bit too familiar, and I nearly bounced off it.
The author reads the audiobook, and does so with love and a good BBC broadcaster voice. But I think I’ve heard so many excellent voice actors bring novels to life lately that some of them could have brought this novel more to life.
It wants to tell a broad story, and is forceful about centring the story of Troy around women. It’s best at doing that towards the end, so it’s worth sticking with.
Part of that is about how it flits frequently between characters across short chapters. By the end we’ve met most of them and get to return to some, like Penelope, writing letters of rising irritation to Odysseus. What was he thinking, to be fair?
An unfair comparison I couldn’t stop making was with Pat Barker’s Women of Troy series. I found it more effective to spend longer with fewer individuals to tell this story.
Perhaps if I’d read this first, and Barker afterwards, it would have gripped me more.
Still glad I persisted — it was another well-told take.
After "A Thousand Ships" I read: Children of Strife
Before "A Thousand Ships" I read: Slow Gods