The Women of Troy - Pat Barker

 I thought The Silence of the Girls was Barker's best work since the Regeneration Trilogy.  Good news - The Women of Troy maintains the standard.   This covers a period of the Trojan story I am more familiar with, having spent a lot of time and thought on Euripides' play of the same name.   Troy has fallen, its princes have been killed; the men have either been massacred or enslaved and sent back to Greece as farm labourers.   This, self-evidently, is about the surviving women who have been portioned out as prizes to the Greek leaders.

Briseis is Barker's principal character in both books.   She was claimed by both Agamemnon and Achilles and caused a feud between them.   Achilles won out and she is now pregnant with his child.   Achilles, of course, is dead.   On his deathbed he gave Briseis to his lieutenant Alcimus, who has given her the best status and security by marrying her.   Other women are not so fortunate.   Cassandra has been given to Agamemnon, Hecuba to Odysseus.   Andromache, widow of Hector, has been granted to Pyrrhus, the sixteen year-old son of Achilles, who hacked down Priam and murdered Andromache's son.   Brilliantly, Barker makes him, not Andromache, the other main character of her novel.   Pyrrhus is haunted by the memory of the father he never really knew.   He is as strong as his father but he has no wisdom, and knows it.   The Myrmidons adore him but Pyrrhus the boy-man only loves his horses, in particular Ebony, one half of his chariot team.

I devoured this book.   If anything I found it even more enjoyable than Silence of the Girls.   Next up, apparently, is The Voyage Home.   Definitely a must-read for me.

The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

I was a big fan of the Regeneration Trilogy, not quite so keen on the Life Class Trilogy, although I still enjoyed it. Neither prepared me for this. The Silence of the Girls is a masterpiece - it's as simple as that. Barker takes the exact same episode of the Trojan War that Homer does, the 'wrath of Achilles', and does it from the woman's point of view. Given that Agamemnon's depriving Achilles of his prize slave Briseis, the captured queen of Trojan Lyrnessus, prompted the long sulk, this is an even better concept than Homer's. We see everything from all sides, Greek, Trojan, man, woman. And the change that Briseis brings about in Achilles, after the death of Patrocolus, is beautifully done by Barker and utterly convincing. I also loved the way she depicted the hero's eerie mother, the sea-nymph Thetis. That said, all her characterisations worked for me: the aged Priam, the simple Ajax, the individual enslaved women, and best of all, ever-patient Patrocolus. There is nothing more I can say. The best book I have read this year. A true work of art. I relished every single word.