Grecian trilogy gives voice to the Trojan women

While she’s not the only one ploughing this furrow – Madeline Miller gave us both the love story of Achilles and Patroclus and Circe’s view of The Odyssey, and Stephen Fry will deliver the latest volume of his Greek myths next month – Pat Barker’s Trojan War books are a visceral experience, made all the more affecting for being told from the perspective of the women involved rather than the warriors and gods we’re used to.

Reworking Homer’s Iliad, with a bit of Euripides thrown in, The Silence of the Girls concerned Briseis and her role in the dispute between Achilles and King Agamemnon. The Women of Troy drew further from Euripides’s The Trojan Women (the Athenian tragedian’s work also featured in Ferdia Lennon’s recent Glorious Exploits which similarly updated ancient dialogue for modern ears) and was even bleaker still.

There was no glory of war, only abuse and rape in a filthy camp. Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, was male insecurity personified, a boy who could never live up to his father and lashed out accordingly.

Briseis is left behind as The Voyage Home begins, to be replaced by priestess and daughter of the fallen king

Priam of Troy, Cassandra and her body slave Ritsa who is, for the most part our narrator. They are being taken back to Mycenae by the victorious Agamemnon, who claimed and secretly married Cassandra and she is now pregnant. But this king is not surrounded by his men. He “was sailing home on a clappedout cargo ship” because of his troubled mind, haunted as it is by the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia 10 years beforehand.

As the Greek forces had prepared to depart for Troy, Agamemnon had angered Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. According to Aeschylus, it was because so many young men would be lost at Troy, while Sophocles maintained that Agamemnon had slain a sacred animal. Either way, the priests called for a sacrifice and even Iphigenia’s pleas of “daddy” had not saved her.

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen and sister of Helen of Troy, awaits his arrival in the haunted and claustrophobic house of Atreus, the king’s father who killed his brother’s children and then fed them to him. The queen is, as one might expect, out for vengeance. If “mad as a box of snakes” Cassandra represents all the unheard women of Greek myth, as even though she was kissed on the lips by Apollo and given the gift of prophecy, he also spat in her mouth to ensure that no one would listen to her, then Clytemnestra is the past returning to claim its due from these superstitious, cruel and vain men.

That Barker condemns this king – a “lethal mixture of arrogance and insecurity” who would sacrifice his daughter but keep his son out of the war – to the fate that Aeschylus chose in The Oresteia, rather than the one told in Homer’s Odyssey, finally gives some restitution to the feminine in this remarkable series of novels.