The Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth

A wily old propagandist paves the way for war with stirring songs of heroism

Agamemnon, Great King and Commander-in-Chief of the shaky coalition of tribes assembled to sail against Troy, finds his ships pinned at Aulis by an unseasonal, malignant wind, frustrating his attempts to cross the Aegean and commence the slaughter. This is tricky: if cloud-compelling Zeus blessed their just sally against Paris for making off with Helen, Agamemnon's sister-in-law, why is their enterprise now confounded with this ill wind?

The Songs of the Kings is a rich novel, sharply plotted and layered with subtle nuances. The taut narrative is a sequence of persuasions conducted over a few days and mostly engineered by the wily Odysseus: Agamemnon must accept blame for the wind because his daughter, Iphigenia, offends Zeus by sacrificing to Artemis; he should therefore sacrifice her to propitiate Zeus; she must be seduced into coming to Aulis; and she must accede to having her throat slit.

The tension of waiting for the royal princess and its consequence – that Iphigeneia seems destined for the altar – is an old story, refashioned from Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis. Barry Unsworth's considerable skill lies not in branding his own imprimatur on these well-rehearsed events but in teasing out the politics and intrigue that govern a thousand restless soldiers.

Against the disquiet of jittery troops, Unsworth parades his muscular but splendidly unheroic chieftains. Vain and arrogant, god-born Achilles (who "enjoyed homicide as a leisure activity") preens himself during Agamemnon's councils. Idomeneus provides pragmatic advice, senile old Nestor witters on about cattle rustling, top civil servant Chasimenos wraps all in management jargon. Massive but dim Lord Ajax of Salamis provides comic interludes by digging latrines upwind of camp, railing against his fellow warriors' obscenities and organising hilariously unsuccessful athletic games. Agamemnon himself is weak, prosecuting war to bolster his crumbling power in Mycenae, and proves putty in the hands of silver-tongued Odysseus.

Words: Odysseus, as an accomplished liar, deploys them with greater precision and strategy than any blunt weapon. He alone realises that control over concepts is the key to enduring power, so he primes the camp's singer to insert key morsels of propaganda into his heroic songs, ensuring the right information is disseminated to the troops. He waxes lyrical in praise of the combined forces under Agamemnon, promulgating a notion of "what it means to be Greek".

Such soothing rhetoric masks his actual situation: the few Ithacans mustered from his barren home won't even be paid without Trojan booty, which Odysseus can achieve only as part of a larger army. If the "Greek" lords lose faith and slip off home, Agamemnon's leadership and the looting enterprise will collapse, taking Odysseus with it. Helen's honour, of course, makes a better cause than economic greed to eulogise.

"People intent on war always need a story and the singers always provide one," the diviner Calchas explains. This salient truth emerges from the mire of ominous interpretation, soothsaying and coercion, and it lies at the heart of Unsworth's own song. The Songs of the Kings is a beautifully measured entertainment given gravity by how accurately it reflects the present political zeal to control the media. Unsworth's Odysseus is no spin-doctor but a shrewd opinion-former whose techniques are resonant with contemporary echoes.