Gillian West, Christie’s modern-day Helen, turns out to be a beautiful but prosaic woman, a talented but not great singer, and the object of affection of two men. She becomes engaged to Charlie, and therefore rejects Philip, who appears to take things on the chin while plotting a sinister revenge. He makes Gillian an engagement gift of a wireless and a complicated glass vase with a delicate sphere seemingly balancing upon it. His somewhat convoluted plan is that she will listen to the opera on the wireless, a high note will crack the glass sphere, and a poisonous gas will be released into her sitting room and finish her off. Sadly for Philip, Satterthwaite puts the pieces of the puzzle together （Philip’s glassblowing skills, his career in chemical weapons during the war） and saves Gillian in the nick of time. A stray cat which dashes into the flat is not so lucky, but provides a convenient posthumous proof of Satterthwaite’s thesis. On discovering his failure, Philip throws himself in the Thames, provoking London’s least-concerned policeman to remark that he heard a splash and supposes it must be suicide, before moving on to something more important （gathering stray cats before any more are poisoned, perhaps）。 ‘It’s not always their fault,’ the incurious policeman remarks to Satterthwaite, before not jumping into the water to try and save Philip. ‘But some women cause a lot of trouble.’ Satterthwaite agrees and wonders if Helen of Troy was also ‘a nice, ordinary woman, blessed or cursed with a wonderful face.’
Christie’s version of the Helen story is obviously a sympathetic portrayal of a beautiful woman whose other qualities don’t rival her beauty. We have no sense of Gillian as a person, really: when she reveals to Satterthwaite that she has become engaged to Charlie, we get no idea why she might prefer Charlie to Philip, or what she might be looking for in a fiancé. We don’t even get a sense of why she is happy to trust Satterthwaite – a man she has just met – with these relatively intimate details of her life. After making her acquaintance at the opera, Satterthwaite then simply bumps into her and Charlie at Kew Gardens. As is often the way with coincidence, it is narratively unsatisfying: not only do we not know enough about Gillian to say why she picked Charlie over Philip, we don’t even know whether she prefers cacti or shrubs.
The passion of Helen is entirely missing from Gillian, a woman who inspires passion with her beauty but doesn’t particularly seem to experience it herself. We can’t imagine this woman abandoning her husband and child for a handsome stranger, or beguiling the king of the city she elopes to, or articulating her innocence, or doing anything very much, except being extremely pretty and being rescued by a man from the murderous scheme of another man.
The original series of Star Trek, always keen to borrow from the Greeks and Romans, reworks Helen into the infinitely more exotic-sounding Elaan of Troyius. In this episode from 1968, the crew of the USS Enterprise are on a diplomatic mission. Two planets, Elas and Troyius, are at war. The ruling councils of these planets have decided that a marriage between Elaan and the Troyian ruler might secure a long-awaited peace. Captain Kirk and his men have the job of escorting the reluctant and scornful Elaan to Troyius while the Troyian ambassador tries to teach her the customs of her new planet. The exoticization of Elaan （played by France Nuyen） sits uncomfortably with us now, fifty years later: we are invited to view this woman as a beautiful but uncivilized barbarian, quick to resort to violence and then tears.
It’s still a fascinating twist on the Helen story: Elaan’s imminent marriage is expected to stop a war, rather than start one, so a complete reversal of the story of Helen and Paris that we find in the Iliad. Here, the diplomatic weight behind a marriage between two warring cultures has turned it into something potentially positive, and everyone is trying to make sure the wedding goes ahead. Everyone except the bride herself.
Her reluctance to marry – her conviction that a Troyian husband is beneath her – is also an interesting variation on the story. We get this same sense in Ovid’s letter from Helen to Paris in his Heroides. This collection of poems written from mythical figures （mostly women） to their absent lovers is a wonderful, surprising take on Greek myth. The Helen letter is a response to a letter she has received from Paris. He has tried to impress her with his wealth and prospects. But she is far more pragmatic, unable to ignore the loss in status and reputation that will accompany her if she leaves her home for her Trojan lover. For Ovid’s audience, Paris – the Trojan – is a barbarian, a man from the exotic east. Helen is a Greek, which is less respectable in first-century BCE Rome than being a Roman, but definitely better than being a barbarian.