The Silence of the Girls was one of my outstanding reads of the last few years. It was one of those books that makes you look at the world in a different way, and shifting the viewpoint of the Iliad from the warriors to the women created a powerful impact with strong contemporary resonances. With this in mind, I was excited about reading the follow-up, 'The Women of Troy.'.

Once again, the main narrator is Briseis, now the wife of one of Achilles' deputies, and as such, in a position of relative security and influence among the women stuck in the Greek camp, waiting to board the ships to sail to their new destinies. The story is also told through the eyes of Calchas, priest and prophet, and Achilles's son, Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus has never met his father, and is constantly overshadowed by him. The book opens with him hidden inside the Trojan Horse, and follows him as he botches the killing of King Priam. His failure to honour Priam's body or grant him a proper burial is the action that drives the plot.

At first I felt that The Women of Troy didn't have quite the same impact as its predecessor, but this is more to do with the subject matter than the way the book is written. The Silence of the Girls is full of the bloodshed created by the wrath of Achilles, whereas this story is set in the aftermath of war. The shell-shocked survivors of the sack of Troy, the tedium of waiting for the wind to change, the barely supressed violence of the Greek men, and the vulneraility of the women of all ranks who are perpetually at the mercy of these men, whatever their level in society, ... all are powerfully and shockingly portrayed..

Each character is entirely believable, of their time, and yet timeless too. Even when you don't like the characters, you are given the space to empathise with their behaviour..

Pat Barker makes writing look quite effortless. This is a gripping read, and entirely satisfying.
I hope that she will write more about Briseis and the survivors of the Trojan war..

I thought The Women Of Troy was very good. It’s perhaps not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, The Silence Of The Girls, but Pat Barker has produced another superbly told, humane and completely real story here as she continues her retelling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the eyes of Briseis, once Achilles’ Prize Of Honour, now married to Achilles friend.

The events here are, of course, very well documented in the Iliad, the Aeneid and in countless retellings since. What makes this special for me is Barker’s remarkable ability to convey the human experience of her characters, most notably the Trojan women who are now enslaved by the Greeks. The Greeks themselves are stranded on the plain of Troy by a persistent hostile wind and the growing atmosphere of discontent, lawlessness and violence is beautifully evoked – partly in the behaviour of the men, but most powerfully in its effect on the women, who are never safe from male whim and violence. It’s a timely portrayal which has strong echoes today, but one which is never heavy-handed which makes its impact all the greater for me.

All of this is done in lovely, unflashy prose. It is writing which is extremely evocative without ever drawing attention to itself, so the real, day-to-day experience of these characters from a heroic tale is quite remarkably vivid. Briseis’s voice is especially good, with her intelligent observation of the monstrous inhumanity with which the women are treated, coupled with her fatalistic acceptance that she cannot resist it and her quiet, determined resilience. Once or twice there is a flash of genuine anger, for example when the Greek men are concerned because many women, including priestesses, were raped in temples and that the desecration of the temples has angered the gods. “B- that, I thought, what about the women?” is Briseis’s response and it hits you in the face. Her characters are excellently portrayed – especially the adolescent Pyrrhus, for me. There are also some genuinely moving moments, like the birth of a child to a slave and a long-delayed hero’s funeral.

Perhaps because the idea is now more familiar, this didn’t have quite the impact of The Silence Of The Girls for me, but it’s still an excellent, engrossing read with some very important content, expertly developed. Warmly recommended.

What I like about this is that Pat Barker keeps things quiet and resists the urge, so prevalent in classical retellings, of falling into melodrama. The whole book takes place in that liminal place and time when Troy has fallen but the winds prevent the Greek fleet from sailing home. The Trojan women are enslaved as concubines and are waiting to be shipped away from their homes, their fathers, husbands, brothers and male children all dead.

Briseis, now married, remains a first-person narrator, with continued PoVs from Calchas and now Pyrrhus, Achilles' son (also know as Neoptolemus in Athenian tragedy). The big stories are merely glanced at (view spoiler) with foreshadowings from Cassandra's prophecies (view spoiler).

Instead we have another non-Trojan Greek myth woven into this story (view spoiler).

The big points being made here are the horribly timely and relevant axiom that men are afraid of women laughing at them; women are afraid of men killing them - dramatised via the boy-man Pyrrhus trying desperately to live up to the fierce warrior reputation of his father, Achilles. The fragility and vulnerability of masculinity is articulated; the recourse to violence to prop up ego is shown without need for additional comment from Barker.

Once again, there are moments when the Trojan War becomes a polychromatic kaleidoscope which highlights moments from other wars: the reaction of the men dropping out of the wooden horse, for example, feels like that scene from a million films when the commandos are inserted successfully behind enemy lines.

I had a few quibbles about the choices the book makes in dealing with the source material: (view spoiler) But I love the irony of Odysseus being the most eager to set sail for home knowing, as we do, that it'll be ten years and many adventures before he gets back to Penelope.

Most of all, though, this is a book which is about female suffering and female endurance: raped and brutalised, with children and husbands killed sometimes before their eyes, enslaved and being sent away to Greece, these women are traumatised... but are also survivors.