I just finished reading Helen of Troy, a new book by Margaret George. I’m not sure to what extent she contributes to the Trojan body of work, never really having taken an interest in it before. I’m much more of a Caesarian scholar, with understandable excursions into the Ptolemaic.

George’s niche has become the great feminine tragedies of history, so it was inevitable she would wind up with Helen at some point. The most encouraging fate of her heroines has been Mary Magdalene’s, whose life was tumultuous but whose posthumous treatment was the real crime against her. Mary, Queen of Scots, Cleopatra, and Helen fare less well; if there’s one thing George can convey, it’s impending doom, although their stories make for much more interesting reading than Jesus’ girlfriend.

I’ve read Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, and The Autobiography of Henry VIII (her one foray into a male protagonist) a number of times each,* enough to have a sense of her writerly habits, and I’ve come to hate her introductory chapters with their dreamlike and contrived childhood memories. Helen fits right in here, and I was tempted to toss the book aside, but out of loyalty, I plunged ahead to the good part. Then it got dull again. Then it got good. Then it became such a muddle of prophecies and gods and bizarre Greek and Trojan names that I couldn’t keep anything straight. What rang true was the question of blame for the tragedy of Troy, how the pretext of Paris’s “abduction” of Helen exploded beyond anyone’s control and took on its own momentum that tapped into the underlying passions of both sides. Weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

I just read that the airline ticket agent who cleared Mohammad Atta for flight on September 11, 2001 later committed suicide, unable to face even circumstantial complicity with the deaths of thousands of people. This has been compared to George W. Bush’s strutting around like a bloodthirsty cock o’ the walk, who has never acknowledged a single fundamental mistake as the body bags stack higher and higher around him. I don’t blame Margaret George for exploring the idea of how Helen lived with herself knowing that she was the ostensible cause for an extended siege of a city and the deaths of many dozens of thousands of people. (To compare, I don’t know how I live with myself half of the time with the livelihood of just fifteen employees, one husband, and an interstellar Boston terrier as my responsibility.)

Perhaps her next project could be My Story, by Dubya, the great tragedy of which will hopefully conclude on a personal rather than global scale.

* I reread them not because they are great works of literature (although they're enjoyable enough), but because I have a memory like a sieve and have to read all of my books many times if I hope to have even an ounce of retention. Of course, I start each one thinking that Mary, Queen of Scots is going to avoid execution this time around or that Antony and Cleopatra will finally prevail at Actium, and my repeatedly crushed hopes are the price I pay for absentmindedness.