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VER since devouring Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, I have come to regard a list of characters at the start of a book to be an auspicious omen of what is to come. In the character list for I Am Pandarus, Michiel Heyns had me right after Achilles, at A is for Adrastos.

Adrastos is the Anatolian shepherd dog of Pandarus, one of two narrators in Heyns’s reworking of the Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida story that has been told previously by Chaucer and Shakespeare, among others. (Full disclosure: I have an 80kg Anatolian shepherd dog at home in real life, and he is the sweetest, handsomest, and most devoted companion imaginable.)

“I have a dog in every book,” Heyns tells me. “Anatolians are a very old breed and would have been around in Troy. I like having dogs in my books.”

That he loves his dog adds to Pandarus’s likeability. A skilled archer for the Trojans, he spends much of his time during the siege as Cupid, trying to get his friend Troilus into bed with his niece Criseyde. You have to like a person who sees the importance of love in a time of war.

“Chaucer’s story is a love story,” says Heyns. “The love aspects became more important as I was writing, and it’s actually very sad in that it’s a reflection on the impermanence of love. Troilus at the end, in the Chaucerian version, he goes up to the seventh sphere of heaven or somewhere, and he looks down and he sort of laughs at the people grieving next to his dead body. Because he says, ‘Well there is a greater love up here; that is so trivial, earthly love,’ which is one perspective. In one way it’s a consolation and in another way it makes it sadder.”

Heyns, who taught Chaucer’s 14thcentury Troilus and Criseyde for many years during his tenure as an English professor at Stellenbosch University, says he has wanted to write his own version for a long time. “I started with Troilus and Criseyde and then through that I went back to the Iliad which is the ultimate source of all these stories. These things overlap and combine in this novel which is a bit of a hodge-podge of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Iliad.

“As I was working it became more contemporary; originally I tried to keep to the story as handed down by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and then as I was working at it I thought well there’s no reason I can’t change this, because every generation rewrites the Iliad. There is no actual history, these are all versions . . . so I thought I might as well create a new one.”

The Heyns version is somewhat more accessible than some of the previous ones, and is laced with reasons to chortle; in I Am Pandarus, Helen of Troy, for example, “may have been the world’s first trophy wife — and if she wasn’t much of a wife, she was indubitably a trophy, albeit of the floating variety”.

Heyns faced a difficulty in having Pandarus talk about modern concepts like trophy wives. “I had a terrible problem with anachronisms — where do I situate this story? In Troy, in 14thcentury England, in 16th-century England? And what kind of frame of reference do I give these characters? So I thought let’s have an overarching frame of reference, which would be the modern one . . . So it was a cheat in a way but it permits me to introduce what would otherwise be a very anachronistic frame of reference.”

His solution was to have Pandarus materialise in a contemporary London gay bar, Halfway to Heaven, and give his memoir to a publisher. The London publisher develops little depth as a character, and the sections set in Halfway to Heaven have a whiff of bolted-on contrivance, but the story that unfolds in ancient Troy is riveting.

One of the excerpts with which Heyns prefaces the book is from Milan Kundera: “Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war . . . that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind.”

The extract is “rather gloomy”, Heyns acknowledges. “But it’s not the last word on the story, it was just a way into the story: ‘here’s a story about war’. We are now at a time when we seem to staring war in the face again.”

A good time to keep our eyes on the antidote. As Heyns notes, “It was Philip Larkin who said, ‘What will survive of us is love.’ ” LS