Book Review: "The Women of Troy"
The sequel to Pat Barker's "The Silence of the Girls" is just as searing and beautiful as its predecessor.
When I first read Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls back in 2018, I remember being struck by a number of things: by the skill with which she gave Briseis, one of the most fascinating yet ephemeral characters in The Iliad, her own voice at last; by the way that she brought a searing intensity and immediacy to the female experience of war; by the ease with which she brought together the ancient and the modern experiences of armed conflict. Now, in The Women of Troy, the sequel to that volume, we again walk in Briseis’ shoes as she contends with the traumatic aftermath of the fall of Troy to the Greek armies.
Now that Achilles is dead, Briseis, along with her unborn child, have fallen into the custody of Alcimus who, while he takes good care of her and marries her, can never be anything other than an enemy. More sinisterly, the Greek ships are stranded at Troy, because a fell wind has blown up and keeps them from setting sail. There are many reasons why this might be so, but it is fairly clear that the gods are angry at the way in which the body of King Priam, slain by Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, has been left desecrated and left unburied. Ultimately, the king is finally granted burial, and Briseis prepares to start a new life among the Greeks.
As was the case with The Silence of the Girls, Barker’s prose here is somehow lean yet full of evocative descriptions. She fully immerses us in the world of the Greek camps, with all of their smells, tastes, and sights. Most of these are, to put it mildly, deeply visceral and unpleasant: blood, feces, piss. However, there are moments of surprising grace and tenderness, as well, as when Briseis and the slave girl Amina go to the orchards outside the walls of Troy, or when the young slave woman Maire gives birth to a male child and the other enslaved women work together to make sure that he doesn’t fall victim to the genocidal impulses of the Greeks.
However, there’s no denying that the Greek camps are a hard and cruel place for both the male masters and the female slaves. The men are always on the verge of violence, and it doesn’t take much for it to erupt, taking lives with it. The women, of course, are looked upon as property and nothing else, robbed of what little agency they might have once possessed behind the walls of Troy. This falls especially heavily on the royal women such as Hecuba, reduced now to a shadow of her former self, Andromache, still reeling from the death of her husband and son, and even upon Briseis, who remains haunted by the slaughter of her daily at the hands of the man who took her as his slave.
In Barker’s capable hands, Briseis is once more a fierce and passionate heroine, a young woman who, despite all that she has endured at the hands of her Greek captors, is determined to live life on her own terms. She forges a number of unlikely alliances with the enslaved women. She is, above all else, a survivor, and she isn’t one to romanticize her existence or those of the other women. She’s hard-nosed and brilliant and fiery. In short, she’s everything that we could want out of a heroine. Rescued from the shadows of the ancient epics, she has at last been allowed to speak for herself.
While most of the novel is told from Briseis’ perspective, at several points Barker switches things and allows us into the minds of Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son and successor at Troy and Calchas, both of whom also contend with their share of burdens. Pyrrhus’ father's ghost haunts him, as does his brutally botched killing of King Priam. Like so many of the other Greek men, he’s prone to outbursts of brutal violence, and there are times when he seems to be little more than a pale shadow of Achilles, imbued with all of his fighting ability but none of the character traits that made him a hero for the ages. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that the book wants us to feel sorry for him, but it at least does give us a sense of the burden he carries and how, no matter what he does, he’ll likely never be anything other than the son of Achilles.
Calchas, meanwhile, finds himself increasingly sidelined in the camps and comes to believe that it is Pyrrhus’ dishonoring of Priam’s body that is responsible for the winds. Like Briseis, he occupies something of a liminal position, since he once served as a priest in Troy and was, in fact, a fixture of the royal court. There are subtle suggestions that he might once have been one of Hecuba’s lovers, and so he’s particularly pained at having to see her in such a reduced state. He is, I think, of the novel’s more enigmatic characters, and it’s rather hard to tell sometimes just what we’re supposed to think about him. He’s somehow both ridiculous and majestic, forever caught between two incompatible worlds.
The Women of Troy, as was the case with The Silence of the Girls and the plethora of other recently published books--Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships--demonstrates the extent to which the Trojan War continues to loom large in our collective imagination. It’s a conflict whose import goes far beyond its original context and, just as those other novels use the conflict to show us various aspects of our own world, so Barker uses it to show us the extraordinary degree to which women endure, survive, and even manage to thrive in the aftermath of trauma and calamity. Though Troy has fallen and will settle into ruin, Briseis marches on, her tale one of triumph despite everything thrown at her by the vicious winds of fortune.Her voice echoes through the ages, and we have no choice but to listen.