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.

Euripides V - Andromache, Herakles' Children, Herakles

Volume V in the Methuen Euripides series edited by my former drama lecturer, J Michael Walton.  He and I failed to see eye to eye on more or less everything but I have to admit I found his introduction here interesting, reliable and stimulating.

On the other hand the translation of Andromache, the main reason I bought the book, is downright bloody awful.  I really cannot stomach translators who want to advertise their own dramatic conceits.  A new version by an established creative writer, like Ted Hughes, or Brecht, or Tony Harrison - that's something else, a new version of an ancient original.  This exercise by Robert Cannon is just risible.  I'm no Greek scholar but I'm willing to bet Euripides didn't write one clause per line.  Ghastly.  Still, I suppose it's a measure of Euripides' greatness that a powerful tragedy still shines through.

I had assumed, in my ignorance, that Herakles' Children and Herakles itself weren't up to much - scraps from the master's table.  With the former I was definitely wrong - the battle of wills between Herakles' mother Alkmene and the devious Eurystheus, King of Argos and deviser of the Twelve Labours, is compelling.  A complicated back story, mixing one part history with four parts myth, is expertly doled out in bite-sized portions.  And Herakles himself isn't in it.  Indeed, Euripides' fascination with the hero - both here and in the eponymous play - seems to be about the human consequences of godlike heroic achievement.  That said, Herakles itself seems to be missing an act.  Did Euripides really just have a character called Madness appear, make a speech, send our hero off his nut and then just bugger off?  I don't think so.  But I did enjoy the Choral song about the Twelve Labours, which sounded to me like an extremely ancient form incorporated by Euripides as a device to demonstrate just how long ago his play was set.

The translation of the two Herakles plays is by Kenneth McLeish and a much happier product.  This, after all, is meant to be basically a source book from which performers can then build their own interpretation.