Volume 50, Number 15 · October 9, 2003
The Hour Before Dawn
By Hilary Mantel
The Songs of the Kings
by Barry Unsworth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 338 pp., $26.00
We are in the pause before war, days of deceptive calm. The Greek ships, en route for Troy, are trapped in the harbor at Aulis by an unseasonable, inexplicable wind. Calchas is a diviner, at present in favor with King Agamemnon, the Greek commander in chief. As the futile hours pass, he seeks a chance to exercise his skill. For six days the wind combs the shrubs; pebbles rattle along the shore. The whole army waits for an omen, for some indication of why their enterprise is arrested. The English novelist Barry Unsworth directs his reader's attention to liminal states, the hour just before sunrise, 'a time disputed between Hecate and Helius'; times of fading light, when sticks are gathered for a divinatory fire, and a lamp burns in the mouth of a cave. We hear the distant howling of wolves, the snapping of the canvas of the tents; the army itself is a murmur on the wind, its discontents carrying, like the odors of the ill-sited latrines, to where the King reclines in his cushioned tent.
Review, 3946 words
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