Breaking the Foals is the debut novel by Maximilian Hawker. Blending Greek myth with historical and archaeological fact, the novel is a different take on the epic story of the city of Troy.
In its first book review, History and Archaeology Online interviewed Max Hawker about his inspirations and sources — and passes its opinion on the book.
Maximilian Hawker: Breaking the Foals Interview.
HAO: The Trojan War is a subject fictionalised so many times before. So, what inspired you to write about it?
MH: One of the first books I ever owned was an illustrated The Odyssey by Roger Payne (which I still have today), and I was utterly obsessed with its depiction of Odysseus’ journey home after the Trojan War. This fantastical vision of an ancient world captured my imagination, and I moved on to read the likes of Homer, Ovid and Virgil as I grew older. I remember sitting in a pub near Moorgate in Central London, writing notes and summaries of the epics when I was in my later teens. There is simply nothing else like it in literature – as far as I’m concerned – and the sheer spectacle of some of those passages was enough to evoke a whole universe of conflict in my mind. To say it is inspiring is an understatement and, at the age of 19 – and as someone who fancied they could string together a line of poetry or two – I decided that I wanted to pay homage to the stories I loved and simply retell them in my own words. I spent a couple of years writing a book called The Walls of Troy, which I flooded with colour, violence and cliché – I never apologised to the friends upon whom I inflicted what was a terrible book. But it was important for me to write it. I had a lot of pent-up energy from my reading that I needed to express quite chaotically. It allowed me to calm down and think about how I might write a proper novel rooted in the legend of Troy. This was how Breaking the Foals came into being.
HAO: Having said that, yours is a very different take on the subject? Why was that?
MH: So, in writing that awful proto-novel, I realised that I was not satisfied with trying to retell the story of the Trojan War and I reflected on what I might actually like to achieve were I to write anything more. Now, there have been – as you say – so many fictionalisations of the Trojan War and I had enjoyed reading many of them already. The late, great David Gemmell wrote a wonderful trilogy of action-packed books that blended fantasy and historical research to create a lively retelling of the Trojan War. David Malouf, in Ransom, focused specifically on the scene in which King Priam comes to plead with Achilles for the body of his son, Hektor (I always spell it with a ‘k’ as opposed to a ‘c’). In more recent years, the Trojan War has enjoyed a feminist approach and, of course, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles was a triumph in its portrayal of Achilles’ and Patroklus’ homosexual relationship.
At some point, I remember asking myself something that I had never considered before (putting the tales of the Epic Cycle down to pure fantasy, as I did): was the story of the Trojan War based, in any way, on fact? I’ve always liked to think that our myths are born out of a kernel of historical fact and it was this very simple question that launched me into several years of study – in between work and family. I started with questioning the city of Troy itself: was it a real place? It didn’t take long to learn about Heinrich Schliemann’s endeavours in the 19th century and the fact that he located what is widely thought to be the ruins of Troy in modern-day Turkey. From there, it wasonly another small step to find the many scholars who have written so expansively on Troy (or Wilusa, as the city-state was known thousands of years ago). The more I read about Wilusa, its people, its religion, its position as a trade power, its place in the Hittite Empire, the more I realised that there was a story to tell independent of Homer about this city. And that’s when I decided that I would write a book about Troy, but not about the Trojan War per se (though I did choose to include some of the key tropes with which we are all familiar, such as my re-conceptualisation of the Trojan Horse).
I was also fascinated by Wilusan social attitudes – particularly those embedded in religious belief – and felt that there was plenty worth exploring there. Now, I have no supernatural element in Breaking the Foals but I thought it would be exciting to dive into the ways in which these ancient people might have tried to reconcile their faith with some of the more everyday issues that affect all of us: purpose, family, duty and, in a big way in my novel, disability. In my personal life, my late grandfather suffered a catastrophic stroke when he was in his fifties, but he survived and went on to live past the age of 90. The idea came to me that it would be rewarding to give a prominent character in Breaking the Foals a similar background and that is how my depiction of Priam came to life. Priam is both a king and a god-on-earth in my book, so how would his people react were he to be presented as the survivor of a stroke? Playing around with this concept made for enjoyable writing and it was an idea quite unlike anything I’d seen before in literature about Troy.
HAO: Why did you decide to retain just Hector and Priam’s name from Homer’s version of the story?
MH: I’d say there are two reasons for this: the first was to draw Breaking the Foals back into the mythology, at least a little, as I felt that by driving forward with a Troy that was as historical as I could make it, the story was becoming less and less entrenched in the familiarity of Homer. The second reason was that the relationship between Hektor and Priam is at the heart of my book and because I’d changed each man from the way they are shown in The Iliad and beyond, I wanted readers to be struck by those differences very early on. I was also very aware of the fact that, in trying to create a historical Troy, I would have to discard the Hellenised names we see in Homer. In reality, the names in The Iliad were culturally incorrect and so, for the rest of the cast in Breaking the Foals, I drew upon the lexicon scholars have unearthed for a language called ‘Luwian’, which is one of the key languages that would have been spoken in Wilusa. Strictly speaking, I broke my own rules in keeping Priam and Hektor at all.
HAO: I can see from many of the details in the book that you have researched the history and archaeology of the period and region carefully. For instance, I note that you use Anatolian deities rather than referencing the Greek gods that feature in Homer. Were there any particular scholars or books that you found particularly useful in this regard.
MH: Oh, definitely. Research for the book was just as fun as writing it and I am indebted to the stunning efforts of so many scholars – a list that includes Michael Wood, Barry Strauss, Caroline Alexander and Bettany Hughes. But I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Dr Trevor Bryce, whose decades of research on the Hittite Empire and near-East studies was crucial to my own work. Ahead of the release of Breaking the Foals, I made contact with him to thank him and asked if he would consider reading my book with a view to providing a little quote for the cover (so long as he didn’t hate it, of course). He got back to me with nothing but praise and I was delighted. I sent a signed, dedicated copy to him in Australia, where he lives, and I’m sure, even now, it is serving well as a little paperweight.
Breaking the Foals: History and Archaeology Online’s Review.
Based on historical fact rather than mythical fiction, Breaking the Foalsputs an original spin on the story of Troy. Rather than rely on the legend recounted by Homer in his Illiad, author Maximilian Hawker instead turns to history and archaeology to piece together the historic Troy — the Anatolian city of Wilusa, known today as Hisalik or “the fortress.”
Although the characters of King Priam and Hector remain, Hawker’s cast of characters is otherwise entirely his own as he vividly reimagines what befell Wilusa. The result is a story that is compelling, moving and believable.
The central character of Hawker’s story is not Helen or Paris but Hector, Prince of Troy. A military leader and notable horse breeder, Hector is torn between his duty to his city, his father and his young son. These often conflicting roles are what drives the story forward. Nor does Hawker confine the drama to the lofty beings occupying the acropolis of Troy. Instead, he gives an equally pivotal role to the characters ignored by Homer: ordinary people of Wilusa.
To say more would be to give away the plot. So I will end by saying History, and Archaeology Onlinehighly recommends Breaking the Foals to anyone fascinated by the legend of Troy but yearning for an original take. Hawker seamlessly blends the historical facts with his imagination to create a well crafted, beautifully written story full of action and emotion.
If you’d like a real feel of what life would have been like in the real Bronze Age “Troy”, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better read.
Breaking the Foals is published by Unbound.
