Title: The Women of Troy

Author: Pat Barker

Genre: Mythology, Literary Fiction

Publisher: Penguin

Rating: 4/5

Cover:

Summary:

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors – all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo – camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it.

The women of Troy.

Helen – poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace – and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.

Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them.

Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king.

Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead.

And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history.

Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker’s extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls.

Review:

I really enjoyed Barker’s The Silence of the Girls so I was intrigued to find out if the follow up would be as good and, by and large, I have to say it certainly is. The Women of Troy begins with the fall of Troy and then covers the long period that the Greek fighters, along with the surviving women of Troy, were stuck in a kind of limbo, waiting, seeming endlessly, for a fair wind with which to make the journey home. This particular setting makes this novel quite tricky to pull off as there is nowhere near as much action as took place in The Silence of the Girls. Yet, I think this lack of action is part of what makes The Women of Troy so effective in depicting the immense loss and trauma that the women of the story have suffered. Briseis is once again a lead character and her story continues in a way that allows her to examine the way the women of Troy are feeling. Women such as Hecuba, the Queen of Troy and Priam’s wife, Cassandra with her gift of foresight and curse of never being believed, and Helen, the women who many believe to be the cause of this violent and lengthy war. Barker manages to breathe life into these famous women from mythology and makes them feel real, flawed and nuanced. I found The Women of Troy sharp, layered and revelatory in its depiction of the women who are often mere footnotes in the stories of supposedly ‘great’ men and shows them for who they truly may have been.

★★★★✩

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