THE WOMEN OF TROY

PAT BARKER

Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £18.99 The Women of Troy is the sequel to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which reworked the Iliad from the point of view of Achilles’ captive concubine Briseis. Briseis is centrestage again, narrating the aftermath of the fall of Troy, in which Greek victors and Trojan captive slaves (all women) are living in the ruins of the city, waiting for favourable winds to carry them home. Lucy HughesHallett in the Guardian found it sufficiently ‘merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak… This is the Trojan war not only demythologised but stripped bare of every vestige of the heroic or numinous.’

Barker draws freely on Greek tragedy: Euripides’ Trojan Women is the obvious model, and Sophocles’

Antigone is equally important (to bury or not to bury Priam is the question). The men are degenerate and unheroic, typified by Achilles’ petulant son Pyrrhus. The women are resourceful, fractious, barbed. Briseis, pregnant by the dead Achilles and now married to another Greek warrior, is both victim and victor-byproxy, untouchable and begrudged by virtue of the child she bears. Barker’s diction is unrelentingly vernacular, all ‘bollocking’ and ‘gobshite’, and Ruth Scurr in the TLS wondered whether ‘Barker’s portraits of Pyrrhus as the anti-hero and Briseis as the unsung heroine sometimes falter through misjudged similes and metaphors’. But this is cosmetic. Daisy Dunn in the Literary Review hailed it as a prescient novel that ‘prompts less pity than anger in the reader, who recognises in the experience of the mythological characters what is only too real’.