Because I'm a sucker for anything set before 1500 and written before 1990, I read Miranda Seymour's The Goddess, which is about Helen of Troy. It was kind of a letdown: I was picturing awesomely bad, and it gave me mediocre. Also I have realized that I probably shouldn't read anything with Homeric characters because I will probably nitpick it TO DEATH.
The main problem was that her characterization was all over the place. It was really hard to tell if Seymour knew that her main characters were kind of unpleasant people or not, which is always annoying. Like, Paris sleeps with everyone (and so does Helen) and by everyone I mean everyone. For Paris it's Penthesilea, for Helen Odysseus. And neither of those makes much sense, especially Odysseus. I MEAN. This is not the place to go into My Ideal Odysseus (ok, it's basically Homer's minus the infidelity), but I think it's a big deal that he turned down Helen.* And I'm pretty sure that the deal with Penthesilea is that, well, she doesn't really have a point, but whatever. Not sleeping with Paris.
So anyway, she sort of reinvents Paris as this great warrior, in the face of all Homeric characterization. Remember that time* when Paris destroyed Menelaus in a duel and Menelaus had to be saved by Aphrodite? I don't either, because exactly the opposite happened. Also evidently Paris is the first to think of using archery from horseback, which I am pretty sure would be difficult with no stirrups. Also remember when Helen gets sick of Paris and doesn't want to sleep with him? Yeah, that doesn't happen.
Which brings us to oddities in the storyline. It starts out with Helen's childhood, and a poor man's Renault/Graves female vs male cult. Seymour can't seem to decided between Helen being basically nice but inhumanly beautiful or actually a bad person. She may or may not have gotten Castor and Pollux killed by encouraging them to go out on a raid (but really Menelaus killed them. or something). Skipping the oath Odysseus makes everyone take to go to war if Helen is ever kidnapped, which you might think would be kind of important, Helen marries Menelaus but he humiliates her and is really upset when she turns out to be barren and then he sleeps with a slave girl and Helen is miserable.
And then Paris comes and, you know, is kind of a douche (actually we get a taste of his douchitude when he's growing up and then when he actually goes to Troy. And I really can't tell if she knows he's a douche or not.) and Takes Her Away From All This. So they go to Troy and chill there for a while. The start of the war isn't actually in Homer so I don't really care, but then she decides to condense the ten years of the war into about two, which bothered me in the movie and bothers me now. And she skips Diomedes and Odysseus' night raid, which is quite important to the fall of Troy. And Helen doesn't fall out of love with Paris.
I know I'm harping on that a bit, but it's a fairly important part of her Homeric character that she feels bad about going (Many men have been slain for the sake of bitch-face me) and that she doesn't love Paris anymore.
Also I really hate her Hector and Andromache. Actually I just hate her characters in general. To really follow Homeric characterization, you'd have to have everyone be basically good: Hector is especially good, Agamemnon sometimes less than good. But Homer doesn't do villains (except Thersites) or just nasty people, which Seymour does a lot of.*
In any case, Helen helps Odysseus come up with the Trojan Horse idea, when she meets him disguised as a beggar (and then sleeps with him). This episode, if not the conceiving of the Horse, is purely Homeric and show a thing that happens very often: Seymour mixing good Homeric events and weird things that didn't happen. So then Helen goes home with Menelaus, his slave girl kills him, Helen gets exiled and then hanged as an offering to the Goddess by her old childhood friend. Really.
The end is basically a whirlwind tour through all the myths about Helen's return: Odysseus and Menelaus make up the Helen in Egypt story to save face, the Helen Dendritis thing is her being sacrificed by the friend.
So I didn't hate it, but it wasn't very good at all, and not even entertainingly bad. But it did make me think about characterization in Homeric novels. You, the generic Bronze Age listener, wouldn't raise your hand, in the circle around the fire, listening to the bard, and say "Excuse me, honored bard, but last week we had a guy here who insisted that Odysseus was faithful to Penelope. And clearly he is righter than you." So why do we hold modern writers, who are essentially carrying on the bardic tradition in written form, to higher standards? Except that Paris' unmanliness probably would have been constant.*
Indulging a bit here, I've always been Team Menelaus at least a little bit, and I don't know why. But really, is there anything wrong with her liking him? Menelaus is not a bad guy in Homer, really. He's a typical warrior, but he doesn't do anything actively douchey, unlike pretty much anything else.
IN SUM: I don't know if I'd recommend it. Maybe if you had free time and wanted to take my copy off my hands.*
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*Actually quite a bit of what I'm complaining about isn't Homeric and I'm not sure of the sources for it (it was in d'Aulaire's!) Like, did you know that the thing about Thetis dipping Achilles in the Styx was a 1st century AD thing? I did not.
*
Iliad 3, 1-37*Especially women, which is a whole other story. Look, I understand your point that all the women hate Helen for her beauty, but it's still kind of awful that none of your women have characters outside Helen or their husbands.
*Seymour has him fighting with a bow, and being praised for it. People. The Greeks thought that bow-fighting was unmanly for, like, ever.
*This is me steadfastly not mentioning that kind of embarrassing and pointless scene in which Chinese people and Nubians show up to be Trojan allies. Yeah, I dunno either.