Victoria’s Book Reviews: The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it-an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and “one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post).
Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war-including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean.
It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

[@leonieclarkinaus]

This was such a great review , l feel better at reading it straight away! Always felt as thought l should read the previous pat barker is a great writer . Fabulous !

[@VictoriasBookReviews]

I cant wait to read more by her!

[@whitepanties2751]

Minor point amid all the slaughter and grief, but I do not understand the trendy modern fashion that we have to say 'enslaved people' rather than slaves.

[@DarkLord-iz7vk]

Thanks for this review.
From around 50 secs to around 2 mins: 'The massacre of Troy has happened...an extraordinary unleash of slaughter...these women, their men have been slaughtered and they have been enslaved as sex slaves, or as prisoners or as work horses for the Greek men, for the Greek army' - sounds like an awful lot of slaughtering! And presumably forcing of women and girls and miseries and squalor of slavery and of life as a captive in the army camp?
This was all brought out, fortunately not usually too graphically, but often mentioned or implied, in the first book The Silence of the Girls, which I thought was very well written and contains some memorable phrases. However, in the end I found parts of it too distressing to want to read this sequel if it was going to be more of the same. That is why I am watching this review, as I wanted an idea of what happens to Briseis and the other characters next, without necessarily reading the whole book.
I was surprised that many female reviewers said they 'really enjoyed' Silence of the Girls, and the same may well apply to 'The Women of Troy', when I wouldn't have thought that reading about the terrible things that happened to the conquered women and their families would be 'enjoyable', especially not to female readers. Shows that I must misunderstand something about female, or perhaps human, psychology.
You can argue that people should know about the uglier, inglorious side of war, but that is a separate thing from enjoying reading about it.
I believe that a third book in the series, 'The Voyage Home', in which the Greeks and their captives finally get back to Greece, is due to be published in a few months, and there may even be a fourth book eventually.
While of course we can't know exactly how Greek was pronounced thousands of years ago, I understand that Classicists pronounce Briseis as 'Bris-ay-yis'. There is a guide to conventional pronunciations of names from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey on the website of the recent translator EmilyRCWilson.com