Book Review: "The Voyage Home"
Pat Barker delivers another forceful, fierce, and feminist retelling of the myths of the ancient world.
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Warning: Spoilers for the book follow.
I’ve enjoyed Pat Barker’s previous retellings of the myths surrounding the Trojan War–first The Silence of the Girls and then The Women of Troy–and so I was very much looking forward to The Voyage Him. In this third volume, Barker turns her keen eye on one of the bloodiest sagas: the tale of Clytemnestra and Cassandra. The former, of course, is the wife of Agamemnon, who has been nursing a desire to destroy her husband for his sacrifice of their daughter at Aulis, while the latter is the daughter of King Priam of Troy and a former priestess of Apollo, cursed by that same god to be able to see the future but to be disbelieved by everyone. The third character in this novel is Ritsa, another of the women enslaved by the Greeks who is Cassandra’s slave and acts as something of a traditional Greek chorus throughout the novel.
As in so many other iterations of this story, this Clytemnestra is angry and vengeful but also, as other reviewers point out, rather sad and fatigued, too. And who can blame her? This is a woman who has had to grapple with the fact that her husband killed their daughter as a sacrifice and then left her behind to pick up the pieces. This is a woman who has had to deal with the burdens of leading the fractious people of Mycenae while her husband is away gaining supposed glory on the battlefield. And this is a woman who has also had to raise two children on her own, two children who seem to love their absent father far more than they ever could her. Her murder of her husband is carried out with almost surgical precision, and it ultimately feels–for both her and for those of us reading the novel–as if it’s a task long accomplished, even as it also sets the stage for her own demise.
For her part, Cassandra is weary, too. And, again, one can’t blame her. The destruction of her life and all that she valued was even more complete than in Clytemnestra’s case. Her chapters show us a young woman grappling with what it means for an entire city and its culture to be wiped off of the map. Like Clytemnestra she is a little world-weary, a little worn down by all of the things that have happened around her. Just as importantly, she also knows that there is no resisting the terrible pull of prophecy. She is so convinced that in order for Agamemnon to die she must die too that she essentially goes willingly into the gaping maw of her own demise. There is, I think, a certain brutal symmetry to the fate of poor Iphigenia, who ended up going willingly to the sacrifice, not knowing until the last moment that she was going to die on the altar of her father’s ambition.
The real heart of the story, however, is Ritsa, who serves as something of an audience surrogate. Hers is the only part of the story told in the first person, and this gives her point of view an immediacy and a potency that’s somewhat lacking in the other two. She’s all of the things that you could want from a Barker heroine: jaded and clear-eyed and a little cynical, able to see through the foibles of everyone around her, including her mistress. Yet there’s also something tragic about her, too, particularly as the details of her backstory are revealed: the loss of a daughter, all that was beautiful and happy about her former life, and her personal autonomy systematically stripped away. Despite all that she’s suffered, however, she isn’t the type of person to just roll over and take it. Instead, Ritsa is determined to seize whatever she can from this flawed and broken world.
In the end, of course, The Voyage Home ends where it must: Clytemnestra has slain Agamemnon and Cassandra and seized power, but neither of her children are likely to forgive her for what she’s done. The seeds are sown for the further decline of the House of Atreus, which will continue to bathe itself with blood and family betrayal, further signs of the ever-escalating stakes of war and armed conflict.
As for Ritsa, she actually manages to escape the palace and forges a new future with a sailor. While she will always bear the scars of her time as a slave–and while she will no doubt be haunted by the death of Cassandra and so many others–she has at least managed to find a sliver of her own happiness, one that has been gained and earned on her own terms. Given the unfortunate fates of so many of the other women captured and brought back into a life of slavery, this is nothing short of a miracle. She is determined to forge a future, and we cheer her on as she does so. After all of the death and despair and bloodshed that we’ve seen during the Trojan War and its aftermath, it’s nice to see a female character get her happy ending.
The Voyage Home is powerful fiction, and it manages to stay true to the contours of the ancient myths while also conveying it in the punchy, potent modern dialogue that Barker has used throughout this series. It grapples with the consequences of war and masculine aggression, how both of these manage to blight the lives not just of women, but of men themselves. Agamemnon is, in his way, just as much of a tragic victim as his wife. His time in Troy hasn’t made him a better or more powerful man; if anything it’s broken him. By the time that he returns to his home his victory has turned to ashes in his own mouth, turning him into an alcoholic brute.
Thus are the wages of warfare.
There is, however, a strange sort of optimism in this tale of death, bloodshed, and vengeance. Of the three volumes in this series, I would argue that this one is the one that is most hopeful for the future. It seems that, even though the old world lies in ashes, it’s always possible for at least a few to be able to claw some sort of happiness out of an unwilling world.