The classics are having a moment.
Not that they’ve ever fallen fully out of favor. But like any enduring cultural staple (Shakespeare, beards, long hairstyles) their fortunes wax and wane. Right now, they’re rising. Christopher Nolan announced that his next film, the follow-up to the blockbuster Oscar-winner Oppenheimer, will be an adaptation of the Odyssey. Emily Wilson’s recent translations of that book and the Iliad made big splashes, not only because she was the first woman to render Homer’s epics into English but also because of her often controversial translation choices.
Perhaps the strongest sign of the classics’ current ascendancy, however, is the spate of retellings of ancient myths from the perspective of their female characters that have sprung forth over the last decade like heads of the hydra: Read one and suddenly there are two more. Many writers have contributed to this burgeoning genre. (Probably the best known is Madeline Miller, whose Song of Achilles and Circe both topped the New York Times bestseller list.) But none possesses the literary pedigree of Pat Barker.
An 81-year-old British novelist renowned for her historical fiction, including the Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy, Barker has lately turned her gaze from the 20th century to the age of gods and heroes, trading in the trenches of World War I for the plains of Ilium. The result is The Women of Troy, a set of novels about the Trojan War and its aftermath related from the perspective of its female participants, the newest installment of which, The Voyage Home, finds Barker departing from the ruins of Troy for the territory of another of antiquity’s most famous myths.
Whereas the first two books in the series, The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021) centered on Briseis, the Lyrnessian princess whose confiscation from Achilles precipitated the events recounted in the Iliad, this latest chapter focuses on Ritsa, a Barker creation who appeared intermittently as a secondary character in the first two volumes. Like her friend Briseis, Ritsa, a healer and midwife, has been captured and enslaved by the Greeks. As the story begins, she is about to set off on the titular journey in the company of her new mistress, Priam’s prophetess daughter Cassandra, who herself has been turned into the slave and concubine of Agamemnon, leader of the victorious invaders. As the names Cassandra and Agamemnon suggest, The Voyage Home is Barker’s take on the myth of the House of Atreus, at least that part of it concerning Agamemnon’s return to Mycenae and his betrayal and murder by his wife, Clytemnestra.
Unlike its predecessors, which spanned over a decade, The Voyage Home takes place over only four days, from the embarkation at Troy to the day after Agamemnon’s death, two days at sea and two on land. Early in the book, Ritsa describes how because of her awkwardness, Cassandra “left a trail of minor destruction behind her.” The novel follows down the trail of major destruction before her that will climax in her murder alongside her master and lover.
Most of the novel is narrated in the first-person by Cassandra’s “catch-fart,” as Ritsa self-deprecatingly refers to herself, while the rest is presented from Clytemnestra’s point of view. We alternate back and forth, the two parts drawing ever closer like their protagonists until by the end, they are occupying the same physical and narrative space. Though Ritsa is the narrator, arguably the main characters are Cassandra and Clytemnestra, two women united — and divided — by grief, a thirst for revenge, and a mutual hatred for a man they both, for very different reasons, want to usher into his grave. The one because she holds him culpable for “the deliberate destruction of a people,” the other for the unforgivable crime of sacrificing, that is killing, their daughter. The scene two-thirds of the way through where they have their one real confrontation is the book’s centerpiece, the moment everything has led up to and from which all the rest will flow.
The outcome of the story has been a foregone conclusion for 3,000 years: The king must die, and he will die. What makes Barker’s version compelling is how she realizes her characters, the evocative nature of her prose, and her considerable observational powers. None of the characters is one-dimensional. Ritsa, for example, is forced to admit that she likes the practical, down-to-earth Clytemnestra, who is ostensibly the villain. Even Agamemnon, generally depicted as a callous brute, manages a flash or two of sympathy, as when he commands Clytemnestra to be kind to “this foreign woman,” Cassandra, for “nobody chooses the life of a slave.”
Only a small sample of Barker’s felicitous turns of phrase can be offered here, such as her comment that the world always changes “between one breath and the next” or the insight that “merely by looking out of a window you can catch glimpses of another life.” But where she really shines is the way she conveys the sense of suffocating toxicity permeating Mycenae. The atmosphere is inescapably oppressive, and not just from the omnipresent heat. The palace is haunted and replete with spectral visions. The ghostly hand and footprints of children are such a routine occurrence they pass unremarked upon. Dreadful voices with no source echo through the structure. Flies turn up everywhere, a sign of the physical and moral putrefaction within its walls. Throughout it all, the Furies wait, implacable, ready to turn past crimes into present vengeance, which will then itself become a past crime to be avenged in the future. In the House of Atreus, there are many crimes to avenge. “Right from the beginning,” Ritsa understands after it’s over, “this had been about the children,” those who had died in the palace and those who’d died at Troy, those who’d died in the past and those who would carry on the cycle into the future, “the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, agreeing that their mother must die.”
Could Cassandra have evaded her fate? Ritsa implores her multiple times to flee, a task which takes on greater urgency once she becomes convinced Cassandra’s vision of her demise is true. She has opportunities to escape, particularly when it seems for a time that Clytemnestra’s resolve is wavering. But Cassandra remains steadfast. As she explains, “You can’t cherry-pick a prophecy. It’s fulfilled in its entirety or not at all.” If her death is the price she must pay for Agamemnon’s, pay it she will. For he must die. “You can’t murder a people and walk away scot-free.”
These distaff retellings of myth, including Barker’s, are often explicitly styled as “feminist.” There’s no denying there’s something to this. As with her counterparts, the concerns and experiences of women provide the source and substance of Barker’s interpretations. When she observes, “In war, men carve messages on women’s bodies, messages intended to be read by other men,” it’s the kind of thing the reader can’t help but feel would occur only to a woman. Much of the degradation Ritsa and Cassandra suffer is due to their status as slaves, and Ritsa frequently comments on the various slights and indignities she suffers because of it. Though often being a woman and a slave are indistinguishable: “There’ll always be people who label captive women ‘whores’ because they lack the basic empathy to imagine what it’s like to have no say in what’s done to one’s body.” If not feminist, then, assuredly, unmistakably feminine, and profoundly human.
At the end, Ritsa, having left Orestes and Electra in a more-than-fraternal embrace and escaped, contemplates returning to Briseis a necklace that once belonged to her mother and was given to Cassandra by Agamemnon, one piece of war booty awarded to another. The seed for a sequel? Possibly. Whether there will be one is uncertain. Barker is known for writing trilogies, and The Voyage Home is the third in the sequence. Yet it has not been billed as the concluding entry.
And on the evidence of this latest installment, it would be a shame should she choose to stop here, not only for her fans but for anyone who continues to be enthralled by the power and magic of these timeless tales, especially when they are wielded by such capable hands.
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Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X @varadmehta.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
