The novel begins from the perspective of Pyrrhus, the disappointing son of Achilles, from inside the famous Trojan horse itself: “Inside the horse’s gut: heat, darkness, sweat, fear.

Though the novel belongs to Briseis, as in its predecessor, she occasionally grants us access to the point of view of the male characters. She tends to favor short Anglo-Saxon words, and she isn’t afraid to be vulgar. Eager to depart for home, the Greek forces find themselves stranded by a mysterious wind, a sign that they have displeased the gods.īarker’s writing is swift, detailed, and immersive. Troy has been defeated, most of its population massacred, and dozens of women have been claimed as slaves and parceled out between the victorious Greek warriors. The Women of Troy picks up immediately following The Silence of the Girls, although there is plenty of explanation for those who might pick up this volume without having read the first. Like its predecessor, The Women of Troy returns voice and agency to characters who were silenced in the original epic. In that volume, Barker did not shy away from imagining the realities of life for captured girls and women in the Greek “rape camp,” and refused to turn the history between Briseis and Achilles into a love story. The Silence of The Girls retold the events of The Iliad by giving voice to the long-silent Briseis, the young woman whose status as a “prize of honor” sets in motion the events of Homer’s epic. Barker’s new novel, The Women of Troy-a sequel to her previous book The Silence of the Girls-is a feminist retelling of the events of the Trojan War. She is the author of over a dozen novels, perhaps best known for her Regeneration Trilogy, an antiwar story set during Word War I. Yet for fans of the genre, the inevitable interplay between the concerns of the present and the constraints of the past is precisely where the interest of well-done historical fiction resides.

The literary critic James Wood once wrote dismissively of historical fiction, saying that it is “merely science fiction facing backwards.” We inject the concerns of the present into the past, Wood suggests, the same way that we do when we write about the imaginary future, and this can result in a text that feels contrived.

The women of troy novelist barker