In 'The Songs of the Kings' Barry Unsworth proves that sometimes the best way to make social commentary and really get people to listen is to disguise it. Coming out of his amazing story you find yourself pondering questions that are quite relevant in today's world (especially in the political arena). How far are we willing to go? Who is, ultimately, capable of deciding between what is right and what is wrong? Who should be...
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A modern retelling of a crucial episode in the Trojan War saga seems an exercise in extreme audacity, even for so accomplished and honored an author as Barry Unsworth. Yet Mr. Unsworth plows this ground with well-honed verbal and cerebral tools. Iphigenia and her story have never been so well-served. Odysseus has never been so well-skewered. The novel begins with the Greek troop ships wind-deprived and stalled in harbor. Primarily...
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As previous reviewers have noted, Unsworth is particularly reliant on Euripedes' Iphigenia at Aulis as inspiration for his retellling of the events prior to the "Greek" army sailing for Troy. Like Euripedes, Unsworth shares a cynicism toward men in power, and toward the making of history. In this novel, the cynicism and revisionism is deeper than in Euripedes' version, closer to what Euripedes does in Iphigenia at Tauris or...
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Bound by unfavorable winds, the Greek fleet lies at Aulis waiting to sail for Troy. Mad King Agamemnon, wily and treacherous Ulysses, preening Achilles, priapic Menelaus, corruptible Homer - they are all there, ready to plunder and loot Troy (forget about beautiful Helen). The winds are the fault of Agamemnon; he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia.And so, throughout the book, they sit at Aulis, getting restless, producing...
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Barry Unsworth's imagination has carried him successfully in many directions, as disparate as a Renaissance Italian sculptor's workshop, the deck of Lord Nelson's battleship, the hold of an English slave ship, and the rented villas of contemporary Umbria, but his new setting comes as a surprise.Traversing the plot laid out in Euripides' late masterpiece "Iphigeneia in Aulis," he sets his scene on the vast beach where the...
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