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Summary
Summary
A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it--an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and "one of contemporary literature's most thoughtful and compelling writers" ( The Washington Post ).
Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war--including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean.
It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.
Author Notes
Pat Barker's most recent novel is Another World (FSG, 1999). She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1996 Booker Prize. She lives in England.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Barker's masterly continuation of her fiercely feminist take on Homer's Iliad (after The Silence of the Girls), the Greeks drag their wooden horse into Troy and achieve victory after a 10-year siege, but a freak storm prevents their ships from returning home. As time drags on, Briseis, the heroine of the previous installment, struggles to survive as an enemy noncombatant prisoner in the siege camp. A former queen of a Trojan ally, she was kidnapped by Achilles as his prize of honor and turned into his sex slave. But now Achilles is dead and Briseis is pregnant. Handed down to Lord Alcimus as his wife, she spends her days, as soldiers play football with a human head, commiserating with the other Trojan women--Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache and, of course, Helen, the cause of the war. Briseis shares narrative duties with Pyrrhus, the bloodthirsty son of Achilles, and Calchas, a canny priest of Troy. In a novel filled with names from legend, Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave, smart and loyal. The author makes strategic use of anachronistic language ("living in the real world," "keep a low profile") to illuminate characters living at the dawn of myth. Barker's latest is a wonder. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Aug.)
Booklist Review
Barker's sequel to The Silence of the Girls (2018) continues the story of Queen Briseis, given as a war prize to Achilles. After Achilles' death, the pregnant Briseis' marriage to his comrade Alcimus offers a modicum of security and status as a wife, rather than a powerless slave and concubine. Through Briseis' eyes, readers experience the aftermath of the fall of Troy. What should be a triumphant victory sours as Priam's body is left unburied and the gods send unfavorable winds to prevent the Greeks from leaving for home. Briseis is an engaging character, both pragmatic and perceptive, providing keen insight into monsters such as Pyrrhus, as well as the women of Troy. Also brought to life are Hecuba, old, ill, and revenge-crazed; traumatized Andromache; Cassandra, cursed by the gods with prophecies no one believes; and beautiful Helen, right back where she began, in Menelaus' bed, while the entire world loathes her. Briseis' story doesn't end with the last page; Barker seems set to pick up her absorbing narrative in a future volume as the Greeks finally set sail for home.
Guardian Review
Troy has fallen. Its warriors, even its unborn male babies, are all dead. The mutilated body of the sacked city's king, Priam, has been left lying in the dunes by the Greek camp, stinking and covered all over - as Pat Barker's narrator horribly notes - with "flies, thousands of them ¿ like a fuzz of black bristles". Now somebody has tried to bury Priam. The Greek Pyrrhus, who hacked him to death at the foot of an altar, is displeased. He wonders who could have attempted this act of respect. It must have been a Trojan. But which one? Alcimus, Pyrrhus's chief lieutenant, points out that there are "only two Trojans in the camp". He is thinking of Calchas, the priest, and Helenus, the Trojan prince who - under torture - revealed the information that enabled the Greeks to enter the city. But Alcimus is wildly, blindly wrong. There are plenty of other Trojans in the Greek camp, hundreds of them. These other Trojans, though, are of no account. To Pyrrhus and Alcimus they are doubly invisible because they are slaves and because they are women. Published in 2018, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls was a rewriting of the plot of the Iliad from the point of view of a captive queen, Briseis, over whose possession Agamemnon and Achilles fell out. It wasn't an easy task Barker had set herself. Achilles - terrifying, charismatic and doomed to an early death - is hard to sideline. Through Briseis's clear eyes the Greek base, peopled by fighting men and captive women, was revealed to be a "rape camp". But, as Briseis herself remarks, "A song isn't new merely because a woman's voice is singing it." The story remained, stubbornly, one mainly about men. In this sequel, though, Barker has stepped free of the masculinist epic tradition. Briseis is still the narrator, but Barker has left the Iliad behind, with its insistence on the glory and the pathos of warfare. The Women of Troy draws mainly on a very different source - Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women. This is a story not of conflict but of its aftermath. It is grim. The words "filthy" and "stained" recur. Even the sea is foul, yellowish-grey and full of dead things. War is dirty and ugly and smelly and Barker never lets us forget it. Men may set out in the morning oiled and glorious as Phoebus Apollo, their chariots glittering, but at nightfall "ash-grey men driving dirty horses would emerge from the clouds of dust". Barker has been examining the human wreckage of war for decades. In Regeneration, set in a psychiatric ward during the first world war, she looked at the psychological damage done. In Life Class she wrote about the ghastly facial wounds by which ex-servicemen were marked. Although she is mainly concerned in this new novel with the women on the losing side, she is also alive to the legacy the victors pass on to their children. Pyrrhus is the son of the great Achilles. English-speaking readers know him best from the speech Hamlet gives the Player King, in which Pyrrhus is a larger-than-life ogre described as "horrid" and "hellish", bulked out by the "coagulate gore" of slaughtered innocents, with eyes like carbuncles. In Barker's telling he is a much smaller and more ridiculous figure, a nervous 16-year-old sociopath whose crass cruelties are driven by the knowledge that he can never live up to his father's reputation. Inside the wooden horse, Pyrrhus is appalled to feel his bowels loosening. "Oh my god, he needs a shit." A number of female writers have revisited Troy in the past few years. Madeline Miller dwelt on the love between Achilles and Patroclus; Natalie Haynes wrote about mortal women but also about the female gods. In Barker's account there is no romance - only more or less endurable connections between a slave and her owner - and no divinity. When characters talk about the way the Greek warriors, raping Trojan woman on the altars, have desecrated Troy's temples, Barker's Briseis thinks: "Bugger the temples. What about the women?" This is the Trojan war not only demythologised but stripped bare of every vestige of the heroic or numinous. Barker's language in this new book is plain, crude and modern. Occasionally it lapses into bathos, as when Briseis remarks that the teenage slaves in Pyrrhus's compound "had come together as a group", as though reporting on the morale of a netball team. Mostly, though, its crudeness generates energy. On Pallas Athena: "Guardian of cities? Is that a joke? Let's bloody hope she's not guarding this city." On Briseis's wedding to Alcimus: "a semen-stained sheet wrapped round my shoulders, breadcrumbs in my hair, feeling sick, smelling of sex". On Helen, and the necklace of bruises Menelaus had given her: "He'd throttled her as he was fucking her. As you would." Blunt and brutal, this kind of language fits with the intent, shared by Barker and her spokesperson, Briseis, to tell truths about violence and slavery without the prettiness of costume drama or the mollifying varnish of a literary high style. Briseis only cries once, not at a moment of exalted drama or noble sorrow, but when she happens on a dead Trojan's never-finished lunch: "an unknown man's teethmarks in a slab of smelly old cheese". Only in noticing the natural world does she approach a stark kind of poetry. "The sun rises, as small and hard and cold as a stone." The plot revolves around the not-burying and eventual cremation of King Priam. The person who attempted to bury him in the sand is a character invented by Barker, a Trojan woman, religious in a way Briseis is not, who courts martyrdom. Pyrrhus is found to have offended against the laws of hospitality and receives a kind of comeuppance. Calchas, the priest, whose point of view we sometimes share, loses his privileged status as reverence for the gods unravels along with military discipline. A slave is pregnant and her boy baby must be hidden. Helen - in a surprising and effective shift away from the legend - is reimagined as an artist, with the requisite ice chip in her heart, living solely in, and for, her tapestry-making work. The main narrative drive, though, is towards the predestined end, when the wind changes, and the Trojan women leave, loaded along with the "other cattle" on to their owners' ships. These novels began as a fictional treatment of genocidal rape. Barker was writing in awareness of the tens of thousands of women raped during the Bosnian conflict. For them, as for the women of Troy, the assault was not only on their bodies but on their nation. Their babies would be their enemies' offspring. Briseis remarks that the Greeks "mean to erase an entire people". In this second volume, as Barker takes us deeper into the female world of the Greek camp, the theme of sexual assault takes second place to that of enslavement. Briseis recalls lying legs spread beneath Achilles, only days after she had seen him kill her brothers, and thinking this was the worst thing ever - the very bottom of the pit. Now, she says, she knows there is far, far worse. She is a trophy woman. She has value. By comparison with the old women whom the slave traders won't take, the ones scavenging around the cooking fires in competition with the feral dogs, she is lucky. But when a person is turned into a commodity, she risks becoming as near to nothingness as a chewed bone. Clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults - merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak.
Kirkus Review
Engrossing follow-up to the gritty reimagining of the Trojan War begun in The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker opens "inside the horse's gut: heat, darkness, sweat, fear," as Greek soldiers wait to see if the Trojans will wheel the wooden horse into the city and seal its fate. We look through the eyes of Achilles' son Pyrrhus, terrified that he will never live up to the mighty reputation of his dead father. The insecurity behind male violence is a theme from the moment Pyrrhus blunderingly hacks to death Trojan king Priam in front of an altar, a sacrilege that is punished by winds that make it impossible for the Greek ships to set sail for home. Briseis, the enslaved narrator of the previous novel, picks up the story in Chapter 3. Now pregnant with Achilles' child and married (at his request) to a Greek warrior, she's well aware that any misstep on her part could send her back to the slave quarters. Trouble stirs there with Amina, who is determined to properly bury Priam's maimed corpse, left to rot in the open by Pyrrhus. "You're a girl, Amina. You can't fight the kings," Briseis wearily tells her. Her hard-won knowledge that "the only thing that mattered in this camp was power" doesn't prevent Briseis from feeling sympathy in addition to exasperation for idealistic Amina, vengeance-obsessed Trojan royals Hecuba and Cassandra (now slaves), and even for brutal, conflicted Pyrrhus and other male characters drawn with the same shrewdness. Barker's blunt, earthy prose strips the romance from Greek mythology, revealing its foundations in murder and oppression, yet she also understands--and conveys--the stark appeal of these ancient stories as she asks us to reconsider them through the eyes of their victims. As with her masterful Regeneration trilogy, the inconclusive close of this volume leaves readers hungry to know what happens next to a host of complex and engaging characters. Vintage Barker: challenging, stimulating, and profoundly satisfying. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The winds have stilled, stranding the victorious Greek army outside the ruined walls of Troy, and captive Briseis--formerly the mistress of Achilles--sees an opportunity for revenge. Among those she persuades to join her are soothsayer Calchas and Hecuba, the aging queen of defeated King Priam. The latest from the author of the Booker Prize-winning "Regeneration Trilogy."
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Inside the horse's gut: heat, darkness, sweat, fear. They're crammed in, packed as tight as olives in a jar. He hates this contact with other bodies. Always has. Even clean, sweet-smelling human flesh makes him want to puke--and these men stink. It might be better if they kept still, but they don't. Each man shifts from side to side, trying to ease his shoulders into a little more space, all intertwined and wriggling like worms in a horse's shite. Redworm . The word sends him spiralling down; down, down, into the past, all the way back to his grandfather's house. As a boy--which is what some seem to think he still is--he used to go down to the stables every morning, running along the path between the tall hedges, breath curdling the air, every bare twig glinting in the reddish light. Turning the bend, he would see poor old Rufus standing by the gate of the first paddock--leaning on it, more like. He'd learnt to ride on Rufus; nearly everybody did, because Rufus was a quite exceptionally steady horse. The joke was, if you started to fall off, he'd stretch out a hoof and shove you back on. All his memories of learning to ride were happy, so he gave Rufus a good scratch, all the places he couldn't reach himself, then breathed into his nostrils, their breaths mingling to produce a snuffly, warm sound. The sound of safety. God, he'd loved that horse--more than his mother, more even than his nurse, who, anyway, had been taken away from him as soon as he was seven. Rufus. Even the name had formed a bond: Rufus; Pyrrhus. Both names mean "red"--and there they were, the two of them, spectacularly red-haired, though admittedly in Rufus's case the colour was more chestnut than auburn. When he was a young horse, his coat used to gleam like the first conkers in autumn, but of course he was older now. And ill. As long ago as last winter, a groom had said, " He 's looking a bit ribby." And every month since then, he'd lost weight; pelvic bones jutting out, sharp points to his shoulders--he was starting to look skeletal. Not even the lush grass of summer had put fat on his bones. One day, seeing a groom shovelling up a pile of loose droppings, Pyrrhus had asked, "Why's it like that?" "Redworm," the man said. "Poor old sod's riddled with 'em." Redworm . And that one word delivers him back to hell. ------------ At first, they're allowed rush lamps, though with the stern warning that these would have to be extinguished the minute the horse began to move. Frail, flickering lights, but yet without them the pelt of darkness and fear would have suffocated him. Oh, yes, fear. He'd deny it if he could, but it's here, unmistakably, in the dryness of his mouth and the loosening of his bowels. He tries to pray, but no god hears, and so he shuts his eyes and thinks: Father . The word feels awkward, like a new sword before your fingers grow accustomed to the hilt. Had he ever seen his father? If he had, he'd have been a baby at the time, too young to remember the most important meeting of his life. He tries Achilles instead--and it's actually easier, more comfortable, to use the name that any man in the army can. He gazes along the row of men opposite, seeing each face lit from below, tiny flames dancing in their eyes. These men fought beside his father. There's Odysseus: dark, lean, ferret-like, the architect of this whole enterprise. He designed the horse, supervised its construction, captured and tortured a Trojan prince to get details of the city's defences--and finally concocted the story that's supposed to get them through the gates. If this fails, every leading fighter in the Greek army will die in a single night. How do you carry a responsibility like that? And yet Odysseus doesn't seem at all concerned. Without meaning to, Pyrrhus catches his eye and Odysseus smiles. Oh, yes, he smiles, he seems friendly, but what's he really thinking? Is he wishing Achilles were here, instead of that useless little runt, his son? Well, if he is, he's right, Achilles should be here. He wouldn't have been afraid. Looking further along the row, he sees Alcimus and Automedon sitting side by side: once Achilles's chief aides, now his. Only it's not quite like that. They 're in control, have been from the moment he arrived--propping up an inexperienced commander, glossing over his mistakes, always trying to make him look good in the eyes of the men. Well, today, tonight rather, all that's going to change. After tonight, he'll look into the eyes of men who fought beside Achilles and see nothing but respect, respect for what he achieved at Troy. Oh, of course he won't brag about it, probably won't even mention it. No, because he won't have to, everybody will know; they always do. He sees these men looking at him sometimes, doubting him. Well, not after tonight . . . Tonight, he'll-- Oh my god, he needs a shit. He sits up straighter, trying to ignore the griping in his gut. When they'd climbed into the horse, there'd been a lot of joking about where to put the latrine buckets. "The arse end," Odysseus said. "Where else?" This produced a burst of laughter at the expense of those who were sitting at the back. Nobody has used the buckets yet and he desperately doesn't want to be the first. They'll all be holding their noses and making wafting movements in the air. It's just not fair, it's not fair . He should be thinking about important things, the war ending tonight in a blaze of glory--for him . He's trained for this for years--ever since he was old enough to lift a sword. Before that even, five, six years old, he'd been fighting with sharpened sticks, he was never not fighting, pummelling his nurse whenever she tried to calm him down. And now it's all happening, it's actually happening at last, and all he can think is: Suppose I shit myself? The griping seems to be easing off a bit. Perhaps it'll be all right. It's gone very quiet outside. For days, there's been the noise of ships being loaded, men singing, drums beating, bullroarers roaring, priests chanting--all of it as loud as possible because the Trojans were meant to hear. They've got to believe the Greeks are really going. Nothing must be left inside the huts, because the first thing they'll do is send reconnaissance parties down to the beach to check that the camp has actually been abandoned. It's not enough to move men and weapons. Women, horses, furniture, cattle--everything has to go. Inside the horse, now, there's a growing murmur of uneasiness. They don't like this silence; it feels as if they've been abandoned. Twisting round on the bench, Pyrrhus squints through a gap between two planks, but can't see a bloody thing. "What the fuck's going on?" somebody asks. "Don't worry," Odysseus says, "they'll be back." And indeed only a few minutes later, they hear footsteps coming towards them up the beach, followed by a shout: "You all right in there?" A rumble of response. Then, what seems like hours later, though it's probably only minutes, the horse jerks forward. Immediately, Odysseus holds up his hand and, one by one, the lights go out. Pyrrhus closes his eyes and imagines the struggling sweaty backs of men as they bend to the task of hauling this monster across the rutted ground to Troy. They have rollers to help, but even so it takes a long time--the land's pitted and scarred from ten long years of war. They know they're getting close when the priests start chanting a hymn of praise to Athena, guardian of cities. Guardian of cities? Is that a joke? Let's bloody hope she's not guarding this city. At last, the lurching stops and the men inside the horse's belly turn to stare at each other, their faces no more than pale blurs in the dim light. Is this it? Are they here? Another hymn to Athena, and then, after three final shouts in honour of the goddess, the men who've dragged the horse to the gates of Troy depart. Their voices, still chanting hymns and prayers, fade into silence. Somebody whispers: "What happens now?" And Odysseus says: "We wait." Excerpted from The Women of Troy: A Novel by Pat Barker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.