I am bored with Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy **1/2
By Margaret George

That Margaret George can write a 700-page book narrated by the famous Helen of Troy without revealing much personality or excitement must be a feat of some sort, but not one that would recommend the book to anyone. (There's Liz Taylor as an equally boring Helen of Troy in a version of Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus." Click on Liz to read a free version of that play on line.)

For long, long pages, Helen is a bored teenager. She chafes at wearing the maiden veil which hides her beauty and protects her virtue. She grows weary of the dozens of suitors who show up in Sparta to woo her. Then for many more long pages, she is a bored young wife with occasional piques of vexation. Her sex life with Menelaus is a dud. She feels distant from her daughter, Hermione. In fact, the only creature she shows much enthusiasm for is her pet snake.

Paris is a 15-year-old boy, an impulsive brat, and a braggart when Helen, 25 meets him. Their pairing strains credulity. I realize things were different in ancient Greece, but have 15-year-old boys changed so much that any kind of elixir made by the gods or Budweiser would render them objects of desire to a mature woman?

Honestly.

As for the grand passion that was the catalyst for the Trojan War, it's all pretty diaphanous drapery, soft sighs, scented rooms, harp music and tender kisses. I've seen more convincing passion in a Cialis commercial. Not surprisingly, then, the Trojan War, the big climax of the novel, has all the harrowing excitement of a bridge tournament.

OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh.

But if you want anything approaching the realities of the war that the women of Troy might have faced, you have to go back a few thousand years to Euripides' "The Trojan Women" (now available online free!), in which the women of Troy gather one last time to mourn their dead menfolk, the loss of their homes, and to face their futures bereft of each other's solace in new lives with their Greek captors who will rape and enslave them.Who can read Talthybius' cruel speech to little Astyanax, son of the slain Hector, clinging to his mother, Andromache, and begging not to be thrown from the towers of Troy, and not be moved:

Come, child, leave fond embracing of thy woeful mother, and mount the high coronal of thy ancestral towers, there to draw thy parting breath, as is ordained. Take him hence. His should the duty be to do such herald's work, whose heart knows no pity and who loveth ruthlessness more than my soul doth.

Ain't nothing like this in Margaret George.