Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold, by Stephen Fry Ferdie Rous
FERDIE ROUS
Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold By Stephen Fry Michael Joseph £20
The quantity of information in Troy is astonishing.
Fry’s reimagining extends far beyond Homer, drawing on Hesiod, Sophocles and Chaucer. He brings together these sources in a concise narrative which in terms of content is hard to fault.
The book opens with the foundation of Troy and the curses that led to its downfall – along with that of the House of Agamemnon – generations before the Trojan War. The more familiar stories – such as the Judgement of Paris, and Achilles being dropped in the Styx – are expanded, while the less well-known, such as Heracles’s sacking of Troy and the tale of how Menelaus won Helen’s hand in marriage – by lottery, as it happens – are drafted into the story.
The work is dense, with footnotes clarifying a pronunciation, or explaining some convoluted etymology or interesting historical titbit.
Fry delves into biology when explaining how Helen’s mother, Leda, gave birth to two separate sets of twins – one courtesy of her husband, Tyndareus, the other thanks to the advances of a sexually aggressive swan in the form of Zeus. The precise term is heteropaternal superfecundation.
This inclination towards the didactic combined with Fry’s cosy style makes the lives of Troy’s heroes quite relatable, but also lends itself to some regrettable simplifications.
His account of the savagery of the Trojan War, the keenly portrayed desire of the soldiers to return home and the blockheaded arrogance of Agamemnon reads like a history of the First World War.
Fry’s rendering of the dialogue is sharp and makes for amusing reading. When Agamemnon moans about not being able to marry Helen, Odysseus suggests Clytemnestra. ‘Marry Clytemnestra! What could possibly go wrong?’ – a nice touch, given Clytemnestra’s later murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy.
But Fry’s extensive vocabulary does get too much at times. The ‘smearing’ of ‘unguent’ over Achilles is complemented by wordplay that tries too hard to imitate Wodehouse: ‘See what’s what, what?’
Troy is an excellent read, but the ending doesn’t do it justice. Fry concludes with the sack of Troy and a needless, condescending assertion that ‘We cannot dare assume that armies fighting under our flag have not been guilty’ of ‘atrocities’ on a par with it.