Pat Barker: The Women of Troy (Book Review)
While Christmas shopping, I saw Pat Barker published a sequel to her novel The Silence of the Girls, called The Women of Troy. If The Silence of the Girls narrates the Iliad from Briseis' perspective, The Women of Troy takes its inspiration from Euripides' play Troades, "The Trojan Women", set after the fall of Troy but before the Greeks leave. Briseis is still the main narrator, but every now and then, including in the opening sequence, you get other povs, to wit, Achilles' son Pyrrhus and Kalchas the seer.
As in the earlier novel, Barker remains committed to highlighting the cost of war, especially though not exclusively by the women who end up raped and enslaved. Characters who in the first novel only had brief appearances, like Hecuba, Andromache and Cassandra, now get far larger parts in the narrative, as does one new character who is new and not based on the Troy-related myths abut very clearly modelled on Antigone, Amina. Barker retcons one bit from her earlier novel - re: who is responsible for the death of Hector's and Andromache's son Astynax -, and in-story has Briseis declare she just found out she'd been mistakenly informed; Doylist-wise, I suspect the change is because Pyrrhus, young awkward sociopath with daddy issues and only able to love his horses, ise now a main character. Otherwise the characterisations for the Greeks remain. It continues to be a very dark story with only a few hopeful moments in between. In fact, too dark for me to reread any time soon, which is on me, not Pat Barker as a novelist, I'm just too worn out for this kind of grimness right now. The one criticism which I would make is a linguistic one; every now and then I was jolted out of the story by a thoroughly modern concept like Briseis saying something like "from Cassandra's point of view, it must have looked like..." etc. I mean, the novel goes for a blunt, timeless language in general, but to my mind, someone talking about other people's "point of view" is someone with a mind shaped in the last few hundred years.
Of the myth-based characters, the greatest surprise to me was Barker's version of Hecuba, who in addition to the expected traits - grieving and enraged mother and widow working towards her death - had an earthiness I hadn't seen in other Hecubas and a force-of-personality way to compel people to do her bidding even as a slave. Barker also gives her a bad relationship with her daughter Cassandra which Hecuba wants to repair but Cassandra, who is long past forgiving anyone and besides knows exactly which mythological ending she's steering towards, does not. That the many women at the centre of this story don't all automatically get along because they're all victims of male violence but have complicated relationships with each other (there are alliances, friendships, but also feudings, though everyone other than Briseis hates Helen, finding it easier, as Briseis notes, to blame her than to blame the men) contributes to the novel's layers.
You don't have to know the mythology to understand the novel, though if you do know the post Fall of Troy myths, you'll know the karma the last scene featuring Pyrrhus and Cassandra's twin brother Helenus sets up; otherwise Helenus surviving when all other male descendants of the royal house the Greeks can get their hands on are killed would feel like a loose thread.
In conclusion: by and large, another compelling novel from Pat Barker, but, as I said, not one I'll be in a hurry to revisit. This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1471359.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
As in the earlier novel, Barker remains committed to highlighting the cost of war, especially though not exclusively by the women who end up raped and enslaved. Characters who in the first novel only had brief appearances, like Hecuba, Andromache and Cassandra, now get far larger parts in the narrative, as does one new character who is new and not based on the Troy-related myths abut very clearly modelled on Antigone, Amina. Barker retcons one bit from her earlier novel - re: who is responsible for the death of Hector's and Andromache's son Astynax -, and in-story has Briseis declare she just found out she'd been mistakenly informed; Doylist-wise, I suspect the change is because Pyrrhus, young awkward sociopath with daddy issues and only able to love his horses, ise now a main character. Otherwise the characterisations for the Greeks remain. It continues to be a very dark story with only a few hopeful moments in between. In fact, too dark for me to reread any time soon, which is on me, not Pat Barker as a novelist, I'm just too worn out for this kind of grimness right now. The one criticism which I would make is a linguistic one; every now and then I was jolted out of the story by a thoroughly modern concept like Briseis saying something like "from Cassandra's point of view, it must have looked like..." etc. I mean, the novel goes for a blunt, timeless language in general, but to my mind, someone talking about other people's "point of view" is someone with a mind shaped in the last few hundred years.
Of the myth-based characters, the greatest surprise to me was Barker's version of Hecuba, who in addition to the expected traits - grieving and enraged mother and widow working towards her death - had an earthiness I hadn't seen in other Hecubas and a force-of-personality way to compel people to do her bidding even as a slave. Barker also gives her a bad relationship with her daughter Cassandra which Hecuba wants to repair but Cassandra, who is long past forgiving anyone and besides knows exactly which mythological ending she's steering towards, does not. That the many women at the centre of this story don't all automatically get along because they're all victims of male violence but have complicated relationships with each other (there are alliances, friendships, but also feudings, though everyone other than Briseis hates Helen, finding it easier, as Briseis notes, to blame her than to blame the men) contributes to the novel's layers.
You don't have to know the mythology to understand the novel, though if you do know the post Fall of Troy myths, you'll know the karma the last scene featuring Pyrrhus and Cassandra's twin brother Helenus sets up; otherwise Helenus surviving when all other male descendants of the royal house the Greeks can get their hands on are killed would feel like a loose thread.
In conclusion: by and large, another compelling novel from Pat Barker, but, as I said, not one I'll be in a hurry to revisit. This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1471359.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.