The Tale of Troy

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The Book is excellent.I would have however preferred if the cover of the book was as colourful as in the above display. That was a bit of a turnoff.

This is a great resource for teachers who want to assist students at the secondary level who are functioning well below grade. Reading is such an unrewarding experience for them because the reading choices in grade nine feed into curriculum rather than meeting their needs. These students require a reader that helps to elevate them from grade the grade three-four level to grade six or seven. This book is well written and tells a compelling story. It combines Homer and others into one compelling tale. The story is interesting and accessible for those students that struggle and are below grade level. Well done.

Every boy (and quite a few girls) should read this! First read this when I was in junior school in the early 70s and still read it now. What an introduction to the very roots of European culture! Read this and you will realise how tawdry the film 'Troy' is in comparison.It is in my personal pantheon of have-to-read-books along with Kingsley's 'Heroes of Asgard'and 'The Heroes', Green's 'Robin Hood', Haggard's 'King Solomon's Mines' and Stevenson's 'Treasure Island'.

The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green is a refreshingly cracking retelling of Trojan War as though to be seen from a magical casement to the misty antiquity, which the father of western narrative history Herodotus defines as the Heroic Age of the Five Ages of Man (which, by the way, Ovid interestingly omitted in his Roman version of the Ages of Men) when divine immortals responded to your pleas directly and promptly and freely made love with their beautiful mortal subjects with unquelled divine lust.Drawn on a compendium of classical narratives of ancient writers, principally Homer’s Iliad, Green retells the beginning and end of Trojan War, reprises the scenes of the heroic characters and capricious Immortals, and remasters the thematic theater of dramas so appealing to our contemporary minds that the story collapses a great divide of realms of heaven and earth, of the ancient and the modern, with his genius story-telling skills as an erudite but affable raconteur. Green takes you to the farthest possible to the Christ-like titan Prometheus punished for his divine compassion for mankind to the wedding banquet of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta where the goddess of discord Eris first presented an apple of discord, to Paris of Troy happily living with Oenone, a mountain nymph, on Mount Ida, to the Greek Camp outside the Wall of Troy where Agamemnon and Achilles were having a row over their beautiful Trojan female captives, and to Odysseus’s proverbial 10-year journey back to his Ithaca. Then the tale of Troy regenerates more stories about the fates of the characters following the end of the epic war, which leads to the dawn of the Iron Age, the Age of Man, where history as what we are textually familiar with, which is still ongoing like Odysseus’s journey to the destined purpose.The Tale of Troy, which is as a matter of fact focused on the last few weeks in the final year of the war, is a literary equivalent of Matryoshka, a frame story embedded in manifold stories that surprise you with a jolly expectation of ‘what next?” Thus, it has no occasion for boredom as a result of the pedantic display of archeological artifices, ostentatious authority of scholastic knowledge usually associated with classical texts. That said, you should not make a rash judgment to regard this book as an abridged version of the great classical literature to be found in the aisle of Children’s book section in booksellers. Instead, it is Green’s altruistic intention to propagate the legacy of Mankind and cherish it as a great cultural endowment to the posterity of the forefathers of human enterprise by sharing his erudition of the Classical in universally comprehensive language with extraordinary vividness and superb narrative skills.The great Roman poet Horace once said it’s harder to treat a story in your own way. In fact, to retell a story is harder than to create one from void because it requires a special ability with the aid of natural wit to make the original source texts adapt to the contemporary readership of the time the author belongs to. To that effect, this book is a magical casement of the misty past told by a Homeric storyteller of our modern time who will take you to where the ancient ocean sends forth the breeze of the shrill Aegean Sun to let you sail an imaginary voyage with the Greek Kings and the Trojan refugees, while the Olympian gods are watching you from Mount Olympus.

If you're into Greek Mythology as I am it's a cracking good read. It's easy to enjoy as it doesn't hide behind language that could confuse. It's clear and concise and the book flows well from one chapter to the next. I highly recommend it.