The Greatest Rewards: A Guest Post by Jesse Browner
Jesse Browner (Everything Happens Today) is back with a gripping take on the Trojan War from the perspective of one unforgettable young boy. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jesse on writing his latest novel, Sing to Me.
Hardcover $28.00
Sing to Me: A Novel
Sing to Me: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city when his father and sister vanish into the war zone; this “gorgeously drawn” novel offers an intimate vision of the most storied war in history, as seen through the eyes of a child. (Laird Hunt)
After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city when his father and sister vanish into the war zone; this “gorgeously drawn” novel offers an intimate vision of the most storied war in history, as seen through the eyes of a child. (Laird Hunt)
I spent more than thirty years working as a translator in the United Nations Security Council. In humanitarian briefings there, I heard the very worst stories of peoples’ apparently bottomless capacity for ignorance, hatred, cruelty and violence, but my oath to the Secretary-General prevented me from writing about it.
Once I left the UN, I was released from that oath and wanted to put what I had learned to useful purpose. As a novelist, I was drawn to post-apocalypse, which I had never tried my hand at before, but I wasn’t interested in world-building or the distractions of technology-based fiction. It soon occurred to me that humankind had already lived through apocalypses of all sorts: the plague, two world wars, the Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans, to name just a few. There was no reason to set a post-apocalyptic novel in the future. Why not take advantage of the materials that history offered free of charge? Because of my longstanding and deep affinity for the ancient world, the Trojan War naturally suggested itself as the perfect post-apocalyptic setting.
The fun thing about setting a novel in a long-vanished civilization like that of ancient Troy is that so little is known about it you don’t necessarily have to burden yourself with vast amounts of research. No one can even say with certainty what language the Trojans spoke, although it was probably Luwian, closely related to Hittite. All I needed was a grasp of Bronze Age warfare and agriculture (since my protagonist is a farmboy), along with a basic knowledge of local fauna and flora, and I was off and running. Almost everything else I might need I could find in The Iliad. I borrowed many of my character’s names from the Hittite pantheon, which may be offensive to archeologists but will hopefully pass unnoticed by most readers.
A central theme of Sing to Me is the need for strangers to talk to each other even when they have no common language or medium of communication. My farmboy is illiterate and his interlocutor is mute, so they have their work cut out for them, but every post-apocalyptic scenario is ultimately about rebuilding civilization from scratch, so it’s a crucial task, in fiction as in real life.
So the one major research project I had to undertake was learning Linear B, the writing system that was used by the Mycenaeans before the emergence of the Greek alphabet but that fell into disuse in the Dark Ages that followed the destruction of Troy. It’s a complex mix of phonetic symbols and ideograms representing objects or commodities. Linear B was not deciphered until the 1950s, but in Sing to Me the survival of the main characters depends on one finding a way to teach it to the other in a matter of weeks. When you’re writing a novel, it’s often the biggest challenges that offer the greatest rewards.