The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker – Daisy May Johnson
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I had often wondered to myself what a gender-flipped Troy story might look like and then I realised that I was not, actually, interested in what I thought I was. The story of Troy, for me, was one of men, at least, the one that I knew was. It was Odysseus and Hector and Achilles and Priam. Women were at the centre of it, yes, with Helen and Cassandra and Hecuba, but also at the edges of it somehow as well. Visible and yet invisible, too. Edge figures moving along a story path of their own, in the middle of anything and yet simultaneously off-page and out of thought. And for a long time, I thought that was it, that was all that they were allowed to be, but then I started to discover other stories about this time and the people in it and I began to realise that the women were there all along and my god, they were always being even if we could not see it and that was the interest, there. (the story of life, of everything!).
The second of a trilogy (though easily readable as a standalone by people, ahem, picking up the second one first, naming no names but I am that people), The Women of Troy is the story of Briseis, pregnant now with Achilles’ child, and struggling to figure out who and what she is in this land now that the war is over. Because it isn’t, not really. There are political battles afoot and vengeance to be had and rights to be wronged, and men must be reminded of what women can do and how they can survive.
It’s kind of unfathomable this whole circumstance and the thought of living it, of being at war for so long and for it to end so brutally, so desperately, and sometimes books can lean into that and make their characters all … Hollywood, as a consequence. Distant facts. Recognisable for who they are and for what they do but not kind of relatable? At all? And I suppose in some way when I read I am greedy for I want some foot in the plot, something that I can anchor myself to and use that as a way to make this story feel like it is about something that I understand, a sensation that I know.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Barker’s novel is immediate, lived. I read it over a handful of sharp, hot days and I read it, curled up next to a lamp in the dark in the cool, and I thought about how much I like what this is. I like the bluntness of it, the way that we learn about the kind of everyday life of the camp, and the moment after the moment, and of how people come to terms (or not) with what has happened to them and what they have done. And more than like, there is this: I love, love, love Cassandra. I love Barker’s sly looks towards the reader where she asks you to recognise and to understand, completely what awful things people can be. And I love the kind of raw immediacy of this, that this is not a story to be seen and read at a distance, not some precious unknowable object, but rather something to feel the sweat of, the heat of, the dirt of.
People do people do people, I think, and every story has people in it seen and unseen and part of reading is about seeing the story that you’re told and realising that it comes with other stories interwoven in it, shadows and light and told and untold and that it’s not up to you, perhaps, maybe to tell the story which isn’t told but rather to discover the ones which already have.
(Also, I cannot end this without mentioning Adele Geras and her impeccable Ithaka)
