Euripides with a modern twist

It's quite a good story, really. Warlord Agamemnon's fleet can't sail for Troy because the wind is in the wrong direction; high priest Calchas announces that the gods' price for rearranging the wind is the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigeneia; her father lures her home from holiday by falsely promising marriage to beefcake Achilles; as the knife is poised, the gods take pity and substitute a deer on the slab.

Euripides turned this legend into stirring tragedy, with a distraught Agamemnon, an army champing at the bit and a heroine boldly embracing her fate. Two millennia later, Racine gave the tale a more plausible final twist, but otherwise adhered to its high seriousness - he boasted that his play's success proved the story's timeless power. The success at Glyndebourne this summer of Gluck's graceful 18th century opera - based on Racine's play - suggests the tale is timeless indeed.

Barry Unsworth is in two minds about that. He's read all the literature, but he can't resist imposing a "modern" take on the story, as though he mistrusts its power unaided. He systematically undercuts it: no floods of tears from this Agamemnon, while Iphigeneia is a spoiled-brat stereotype. But she's also, in the words of Menelaus, "a nice bit of stuff", because we speak demotic English here, laced with standard put-downs like "motherf****r" and "piece of s**t".

Sometimes the tone veers towards picturesque Forces slang: "I'll have your guts for garters." At others it's queasily unplaceable: "By Zeus! It's hot in here. I fancy a dip. Not in Ajax's latrine though." Iphigeneia addresses her maid like a social worker: "You really should try to be more focused."

But, since Unsworth is also aware of the poetry in archaic lore, his characters religiously read the entrails of goats and go big on gnomic utterances. The long ones are best, but the short ones have their charm: "It is dangerous to neglect a god, even when not knowing. Punishment can arrive before knowledge."

The disabling thing is not that the author wants to have it both ways stylistically, but that he wants to do so in every second paragraph. His lurches in tone come across as slightly mad.

Unsworth's famously perfect prose does allow us intermittent pleasures - cinematically vivid ritual scenes, the scents, sounds and colours of the Attic landscape - but its constant indulgence results in a narrative without suspense.

Instead of transporting us to a convincing world - as the much-patronised Mary Renault did with her Athenian tales - he now draws laborious political morals, tiresomely parades his literary finesse and tries, and fails, to make us laugh.

The only point scored with any force lies in his noting of the mob's sexual excitement at obscene violence on a beautiful child, which rings a very contemporary bell.

Otherwise, this indigestible Greek tract merits a Roman thumbs-down.