Woman’s place is in the Homer
THE WOMEN OF TROY by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton)
FOR all its huge critical acclaim, some found Pat Barker’s 1990’s award-winning Regeneration trilogy about shell-shocked soldiers in World War I a little clinical and distant. Her characters, including the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, were too cursorily drawn, and the narrative too meandering.
Fast-forward to 2018, and The Silence Of The Girls, the first in a trilogy based on The Iliad, Homer’s ancient Greek war epic, suffered from none of those problems – it was warm, immersive and very bloody angry about the fact that women have too often had to take refuge in silence as men go about their loutish business.
The second novel in the trilogy, The Women Of Troy, mostly set in camp after the war as the Greek victors wait for the poor weather to abate before sailing home, is better still. The central character is still Trojan slave Briseis. Her rapist and slaveowner, Achilles, may now be now dead but he has left her pregnant. As the men in camp drink, squabble and plot, Briseis takes it upon herself to monitor the well-being of the women in camp, build alliances and devise an elaborate plan for revenge. The Women Of Troy’s immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker’s precise, elegant writing. Right from the off, we’re in the Trojan horse, with scores of sweaty, terrified men waiting to penetrate Troy’s central citadel – it’s a thrilling start. Yet, the real beauty unfurls as Briseis traverses the camp gradually growing her network of females, who are often as suspicious of each other as they are the men in the camp.