The English novelist Barry Unsworth has shown his liking for historical themes and settings before: Sacred Hunger, his 1992 Booker Prize winner, takes place aboard an 18th-century slave ship; Morality Play concerns a troupe of 14th-century travelling performers, and Losing Nelson charts the dangers of mythologising historical figures.
The jacket of his new novel, The Songs of the Kings, set in ancient Greece, tells us, in big letters: "There is always another story. But it is the stories told by the strong, the songs of the kings, that are believed in the end". We are promised that the characters will throw off "the heroic values we expect of them, embracing the political ethos of the 21st century and speaking in words we recognise as our own".
Using Greek mythology to make points about the modern world is an exercise as old as the myths themselves. And as it is almost a century ago now that Joyce gave the figure of Ulysses (or Odysseus, as in Unsworth's novel) a modern human dimension, we have come to expect that the old tales should at least be told in an innovative way.
What is surprising, then, in Unsworth's novel, is the plainness of the style, the lack of modernity of the dialogue, and the shallowness of the characterisation. The story itself concerns the Greek army under Agamemnon, besieged by vicious winds at Aulis and unable to begin its voyage to Troy in search of war, revenge and pillage. The intended modern spin on the events is that they are seen largely through the eyes of Agamemnon's "diviner", Calchas, and of a slave girl, Sispyla. Calchas is charged with reading the will of the gods as revealed by his special insights into nature; he is, however, doubtful of his powers, and soon forced into the role of passive observer as his rivals within the camp persuade Agamemnon that he must sacrifice his teenage daughter, Iphigenia, to Zeus before the fleet can set sail.
Similarly, Sisipyla, Iphigenia's slave and confidante, is almost powerless to influence the manoeuvres of such as Odysseus (recast here as a gloating sadist), as they set up the slaughter and then make sure it is recycled by the Singer (the media of his day) as heroic myth.
The point about the ownership of history is clearly made (though ours is not an era particularly transfixed by notions of political or military heroism), but the reduction of the mythic characters to near-caricature, with their irritating habits of speech and repetitive personal tics, brings the book itself down to a mundane level. It needs something extra - a satirical edge, more imaginative power or linguistic panache - to make the exercise worthwhile.
It is clear that Unsworth revels in the build-up of historical detail, and this contributes to the atmospheric picture of a superstitious, frightened group of men waiting for their leaders to find a pretext for war (a situation that could certainly have had modern relevance). The story's abrupt ending, however, gives the impression that Unsworth himself has run out of patience with an idea whose unifying thread he couldn't find.
The Songs of the Kings. By Barry Unsworth. Hamish Hamilton. 245pp. £16.99 sterling
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist