The battle of the sexes
A. N. Wilson
THE HUSBANDS by Christopher Logue Faber, £6.99, pp. 55 Christoper Logue's two previous volumes, War Music and Kings were `accounts' — his word — of early episodes in the Iliad. Thoroughly modern in treatment and language, they seemed nevertheless to give us more flavour of the Iliad — its relentless bloodiness, its painful- ness, its hard-edged beauty — than many of the translations on our shelves.
Now he has done it again, with Husbands, which he calls an 'account' of Books III and IV. The central event in these books is Hector's proposal that the Trojan war should be settled by single combat.
Menelaos (wronged husband of Helen) accepts the challenge, even though his brother Agamemnon and the other Greeks believe that he will be killed if pitted against the most heroic of Priam's sons. In the event, however, the fight takes place between Menelaos and Paris — the man who started all the trouble in the first place by stealing Helen from her Argive husband. In the fray, Aphrodite covers Paris in a mist and spirits him away.
The Iliad is the best of stories, and like all good stories it can be re-read on a multitude of levels. Without making the contest between the two heroes into an allegory, we can feel that there is some- thing archetypal about the withdrawal of Paris from an all-male scene of blood and pain to one of overpowering lust and the bedroom of the most beautiful woman in the world. Is he just a coward, running away, or is he actually 'carried away'?
Christopher Logue in his spare, carefully controlled verse-language never nudges the reader into making facile comparisons with contemporary life. Instead, he makes us feel that we are Homer's contemporaries, rather than he ours.
You can't fault the speech which Logue gives to Aphrodite, delivered to Helen when she is bemoaning both the cowardice of Paris and the fact that she has been the cause of so much suffering and war: Do stop this nonsense, Helen dear. You are not lost. You never shall be lost.
You are my representative on Earth. You look around you — and you wait. Try not to play the thankless bitch: `Such a mistake to leave my land, my kiddywinle. What stuff. Millions would give that lot For half the looks that I have given you ....
This speech is all in Homer — roughly speaking — and the raunchiness of Logue's Helen is something which gives sense to the whole Trojan myth. How else explain a war which started because one man took another man's wife unless, as Logue does (and Homer does) you can convey two whole armies of randy men, who regard female flesh as the most precious of war's spoils? (We, with our money obsession, have to fight wars over Arab oil — more boring).
Everyone reading the story — even if they first did so in Andrew Lang or in Roger Lancelyn Green's charming Puffin The Tale of Troy — will have developed the sense that the heroes on both sides of the conflict were 'larger than life'. But consid- er, nevertheless, the marvellously surpris- ing quality of these lines by Logue: (describing Paris): The centuries have not lied: Observe the clotted blossom of his hair, Frost white, frost bright — and beautifully cut, Queen Aphrodite's favourite Illian. And though his hands are only archer's hands, Half Hector's size, his weight half Hector's weight, He is as tall as Hector (8' 9").
This is typical Logue. It is as crisply, accu- rately visual and as funny as a canvas by Magritte.
As in the Iliad itself, the truly reprehensi- ble characters are the Immortals. Logue has great fun with God (as he rightly calls Zeus) and his wonderfully angry brother Poseidon. The scene in which the two quar- rel is extremely funny, but loses none of the splendour of the scene as it might have been conceived by a Baroque painter. (In trying to describe Logue's Homer one keeps reverting to painterly images). Logue's God — Homer's God — Our God — is not so much a sadist as morally neuter, wholly indifferent either to human suffering or to what mortals would call ethics. He seems like some terrible old general of the first world war as he says to his sea-god brother, `Between ourselves' (Leading him out onto the sand) 'I may wind up this war, And then, Pope of the Oceans, with Greece rowing home You will have sacrifices up to here .... '
When Athene prays to God in a later scene to finish Troy and make 'its race, rot- ten beneath the rubble, oozing pus', God agrees, while telling her (Harold Macmillan-like), 'You know how fond I am of Troy'. The prayers and sacrifices offered to the Immortals by men and women are, as in Homer, of no use to them at all unless God and his family and concubines happen to be in a good mood.
Enough has been said to indicate the kind of book Husbands is. It is a poem about the way men and women manipulate one another; it is about sex; it is about war and violence; it is about the hopeless inadequacy of theology to explain or to console. It is a poem by Christopher Logue, not a mere version of Homer; and it never seemed more relevant. (I was going, in a banal way, to rehearse some items of current affairs in which Rwandan mortals were dying in their thousands through the pitilessness of God, or Princesses closer to home were causing mayhem because of their attrac- tiveness to soldiers; but there is no need.) The themes are timeless and universally applicable.
Like every poet since Homer's day, Logue has used the Iliad for plunder but he has come up with something marvel- lously itself. I admired the first two books, but Husbands is even better. Logue is on top form, and how miraculous that one poet can be scabrous, satirical, savage and cruel in those very same 50 pages which show him to be tender, lyrical and — right- ly, given the enormity of his theme — awe- struck. His ear and his eye never let him, or us, down.
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