Cassie McCullagh

He can't work out at first whether it is about or by a character known as Soas.

Muse, have you forgotten him?

Soas was his name.

And Soas is somebody who is telling a story but is described as the son of nobody.

And at first, this scholar can't work out what that means.

What does it mean to describe somebody as a son of nobody?

Is it an insult?

And then as he goes on, what he realizes is that he has uncovered a new epic of the Trojan War that has been written from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

So it's not about the great heroes and leaders, although they appear in the story.

It's all written from a muddier, bloodier, grittier perspective of the people who are

rowing the ships, the people who are standing side by side in the phalanxes, the ones who are like the herd of small animals rather than like the heroic lions who rush in and do their violent work.

So after setting up this process and the research and the fragmentary stuff, then we actually get above the line on this page an entire epic written in the form of an epic.

Now, this makes for quite intense reading and it does go in and out of the story that we know of the Iliad.

So we sort of need the story that's happening in the bottom half of the page as well.

We need to keep going back to this story.

fairly difficult, self-obsessed scholar who has neglected his family in Canada and who is also not paying attention to what the senior academics in Oxford want him to do.

We need to go in and out of his story almost as a relief from the intensity of this new epic.

But what he does that's quite compelling is that he'll pick up on individual lines and take them apart.

I mean, of course, this is all a fiction.

So he's taking apart a fictional line in a fictional way.