Derring-do, skulduggery and long-lost Trojan treasures

Associated media

Clare Finn encounters hallucinations and wartime resistance in Troy? No, Estonia

The Face of Agamemnon by John Galway

I am a fan of historical fiction (‘faction’), a light way to cover history, and artistic licence adds spice and enjoyment. But this novel’s title and the cover image of Heinrich Schliemann’s gold Mask of Agamemnon may lead readers to think this story is set in Greece where Schliemann found the mask, or perhaps in Turkey, where he found Priam’s treasure. In fact, this story is situated in Estonia, Ireland and Switzerland.

Potentially Schliemann is a rich source for historical fiction. He madeseveral fortunes, such as from cornering the market in indigo and then in saltpetre and other constituents of ammunition, which he then sold to the Russian government during the Crimean War. He turnedto archeology in the 1850s. Digging at Troy in present-day Turkey in 1873 he found a treasure that he attributed to Priam, the king of Troy during the Trojan War. In 1876, digging in Mycenae in Greece, he found the gold mask of this book’s title, which he attributed to Agamemnon, brother of Helen of Troy’s husband, Menelaus.

Doubts about these treasures are rife, not least as modern archaeologists indicate they were found in levels a millennium earlier than those dating to the Trojan War. But be they real, fake or pastiche these arguments are best followed through the pages of Archaeology magazine or some of the many books and articles covering the subject, such as David Traill’s Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit, St Martin's Press (1997), Neil Asher Silberman’s Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East, Doubleday (1989), or Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War, New American Library (1987).

Galway mentions Schliemann only briefly. In fact, reference to Schliemann’s treasures make up less than 4% of this book’s plot.  No, the story covers a later episode in the life of Priam’s treasure. Acquired by Berlin’s Königliche Museen in 1881, during the Second World War it was placed in the Berlin Zoo’s Flakturm or Zoo Bunker for safekeeping along with other treasures: the Kaiser’s coin collection, Nefertiti’s head, the disassembled Pergamon Altar of Zeus. In 1945 Priam’s treasure disappeared from the bunker only to reappear in 1993 in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum.

Galway’s story, based allegedly on a manuscript validity of which, he says, cannot be verified, covers the theft of that treasure from the Russians by members of the Estonia’s Second World War Resistance Movement. The Russian NKVD, the Nazis, the Irish Garda, the Jewish question, British intelligence, the CIA, and a Lapp shaman, among others, all make an appearance in the story, as do two psychics and hallucinogenic drugs that enable the narrator to see both Helen of Troy and Agamemnon’s death. The main protagonist, a one handed, one-time journalist now an arms dealer with a side line in fine art and antiquities, who specializes ‘in providing very rich people with rare pieces, which only they will ever view’, wrests from a Russian bully boy a ransomed diadem belonging to Priam’s treasure. A bit of artefact copying and substitution naturally are involved before finally the diadem is returned to the Pushkin Museum, and apparently the Hermitage. Please note that it is not Agamemnon’s Mask that is ransomed. No, the mask only appears in hallucinogenic visions.

I do love a tale of derring-do and skulduggery but why call this book The Face of Agamemnon? Cassone readers may feel misled – unless they are keen on tales of the Estonian Resistance Movement.

The Face of Agamemnon  by John Galway is published by  AuthorHouse, Bloomington, Indiana, 2013. 178pp., unillustrated. ISBN 978-1481787857