The inconclusiveness of Pat Barker’s earlier novel, The Girls of Troy (2021) – a sequel to 2018’s The Silence of the Women – left the impression that it’d turn out to be the center of a trilogy, not least as a result of she already had two earlier wartime trilogies underneath her belt. However to evaluate from The Voyage Dwelling, the third instalment in Barker’s retelling of Greek struggle myths by way of the eyes of their conquered ladies, she could also be eyeing a fair longer mission. The place earlier volumes drew on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, right here we flip to the home bloodletting recounted within the first a part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, so plentiful in drama that Barker’s heroine in her earlier two books, the enslaved Trojan queen Briseis, doesn’t even get a look-in.
Abruptly sidelining a significant participant labored effectively for The Wire, and that type of box-set breadth appears to be what Barker is after in The Voyage Dwelling, with characters and themes low or excessive within the combine as most closely fits. This time, although, I’m undecided the digital camera is in fairly the correct place. The novel opens with Troy “fucking pulverised”, within the phrases of Greek king Agamemnon, getting ready to sail residence for his victory parade, which is about to be completely rained on due to his spouse, Clytemnestra – out to avenge the daughter he sacrificed to make sure the gods smiled on his struggle.
With Briseis left on shore, we witness the Greeks’ bumpy crossing and even bumpier return by way of the eyes of one among their captives, Ritsa, a maid to Cassandra, whom Agamemnon has taken as yet one more trophy spouse (she’s the daughter of the slain Trojan king Priam). For clairvoyant Cassandra, her enslavement is only one extra step in direction of the grisly doom she has already envisaged for her captor.
As in earlier instalments, Barker units out to demystify the story. See the reply when Ritsa spots Cassandra crying and asks what’s mistaken: “Nothing, it’s simply I get so sore. You’ll be able to faux about all the things else, however you’ll be able to’t faux about that. Not that he ever notices. Little bit of spit, in he goes.” Whereas the novel’s regular deal with characters with out energy provides loads of grim element alongside these strains, the gravity of the narrative is tugging us all of the whereas in the other way, in direction of the dysfunctional royals on the e book’s coronary heart – most of all Agamemnon’s scheming spouse, of whom we get occasional glimpses, making you surprise why we wanted to be so removed from the motion within the first place.
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That stated, there’s an ever-present electrical energy in Barker’s knack for calling a spade a shit-crusted shovel by any means attainable. Ritsa isn’t a maid however a “catch-fart”. Cassandra feels Agamemnon’s “fuck-sweat clammy on her pores and skin… His cum’s tightening on her thigh.” Piss-wet bedsheets and menstrual cloths want rinsing; a hair will get post-coitally plucked from between somebody’s tooth. Folks inform one another to “shift your arse” and “shurrup”, and somebody laments Ritsa’s late husband in phrases that hardly wax sentimental: “He labored miracles with my piles. That cream he give me shrank them proper down.”
The place The Silence of the Women plunged us into the drama of invasion, sparing the reader little concerning the brutality of conquest, The Girls of Troy was extra a personality examine, centered on Briseis’s feelings throughout her being pregnant from rape. The Voyage Dwelling, tonally in between, mixes open-ended scene-making with blockbuster dialogue (“Too dangerous… there’s no time”) and dollops of Hollywood sadism: “Do you bear in mind what Daddy’s sword does?… Why don’t you name in your daddy now?” Someway, the two-speed pacing makes caring equally about each strands peculiarly tough: after Agamemnon will get his simply deserts in a hallucinatory scene of three-way voyeurism, the climax of Ritsa’s story feels prefer it belongs in a special novel, centred on the unlikely solace she finds within the arms of an invader.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t guess on the journey ending right here – nor would I be shocked if, subsequent time, Barker adjustments tack and goes absolutely Greek.
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