Homer never did this

currently: Barry Unsworth

What I love most about The Songs of the Kings is really very simple: the diction is so strange that you eventually wind up with sentences like:

"No we can't allow Agamemnon to be marginalized, whatever happens we can't allow that, [said Odysseus]"

Furthermore, while the story is ostensibly a retelling of an early portion of The Illiad, it's impossible for me to read it as anything other than an allegory for the Iraq War. It was published in 2003; perhaps chronology makes this impossible. I would argue that it doesn't. In support of this interpretation, I offer the following quotation:

"If the cause of the war is just, nothing that happens in the pursuit of the war can make the war less just. The slaughter of the innocent cannot detract from the justice of the cause, thought we may possibly call it an unjust effect of a just cause. If this were not so, there would be no such thing as a just war, only a necessary war, which is clearly absurd. Can Calchus be saying that Lord Zeus is embarking us on a just cause whose inherent nature was that it could subsequently become less just, was in fact embarking us on an unjust cause from the very beginning?"

A stupid but ambitious leader. The sense of a wrong that needs avenging. A loss of enthusiasm for the war. A search for a new cause for the war that will bind the people together and renew there desire to attack. Lots of jargon. If it was written too early to be an allegory, then it was a prophecy.