Black Ships
Jo Graham
Orbit, 2008
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 0-316-06800-4
448 pages; $14.99

Virgil’s Aeneid has had new life breathed into it by a number of authors and translators of late. First, Robert Fagles offered his new translation in 2006, to much acclaim. Then, Ursula K. LeGuin and Jo Graham offered their fictional renderings of different portions of Aeneas’s life almost simultaneously. In Black Ships, Jo Graham writes of the hero Aeneas’s search for a new home for his people, the survivors of the fall of Troy; and Ursula K. LeGuin takes up almost exactly where Graham leaves off in Lavinia, written from the perspective of Aeneas’s new wife in his new home.

Black Ships is told from the perspective of someone we first meet as a girl named Gull, the daughter of a woman stolen from Troy when it fell and made a slave by the Achaians. She is born from a rape, but her mother loves her no less for that. Still, her mother is unable to save her when a chariot passes through, running over Gull’s leg and crippling her, making her unfit to work the flax fields. Gull’s mother therefore dedicates her to Pythia, the goddess of the dead, and it quickly becomes apparent that Gull does, in fact, have the gift of prophecy.

Gull becomes Linnea, apprenticed to the woman who then serves as Pythia and learning the ways of the goddess. It is a quiet life until the day the nine black ships arrive, a day that changes everything. Linnea meets Aeneas and becomes his Sybil, guiding him through angry seas, unknown islands, difficult diplomacy, war, and a doomed love affair. Only a girl herself, she nonetheless finds her own way, her own strength, and her own love.

Black Ships is painstakingly researched and thoroughly thought out, with some details from The Aeneid changed in order to make historical sense. I enjoyed reading about historical bits and pieces such as what the characters ate, how warfare was actually waged, how ships worked and what ancient religions were actually like. The characters are reasonably well-drawn, if perhaps almost universally too good to be true. One does wonder why Aeneas is always willing to drop everything and mobilize an army on the word of an 18-year-old girl, but after Aeneas has a bit of experience with Sybil’s power, it only makes sense to listen to her. The picture of Sybil’s own love affair with her chosen mate is drawn well enough that it brought me close to tears at the end of the book. As to the inevitable comparison with LeGuin: LeGuin is a master craftswoman, who has been writing for decades. Lavinia is a beautiful book, telling an altogether different story. Read it, too.

This is a well-written first historical novel by this author, from whom I am glad to say there is already a second book in press: Hand of Isis, set in Egypt. I hope to be able to tell you about it soon.