Marc's Reviews > The Women of Troy

As impressive as the first part of this Trojan cycle was, as flat this second part seemed to me. What a weird contrast. In The Silence of the Girls Barker delivered an imposing retelling of Homer's Iliad, especially from the perspective of the imprisoned Trojan princess Briseis. Shocking and captivating at the same time. 'Women of Troy' builds chronologically and thematically on that first part. We see Briseis – pregnant with Achilles who has in the meantime passed away – now wandering around in the Greek camp, after the fall of Troy. She systematically visits the other Trojan women and in this way Barker once again sketches their own, usually disconcerting story: it is an accumulation of humiliations, unfulfilled desires and expectations, but also of wounded pride and feelings of revenge. The Greek princess Helena, who was the cause of the Trojan War, shows her most narcissistic and manipulative side. Strikingly, more women take matters into their own hands, such as the imposing Cassandra (the Trojan princess with predictive powers that no one believes) or the slave girl Amina (an alternative Antigone). The male opponents fare even less well than in the first part. In particular the young Pyrrhus, the teenage son of Achilles, is portrayed as an overconfident adolescent who is tormented by his father's shadow.

This story takes place between the fall of Troy and the departure of the Greek warriors, a long period of time when gale-force winds (caused by the angry gods) delay departure. The lack of action weighs heavily in this novel, which keeps the reader rather unfulfilled all the time. Stylistically it is all a bit less, and story-wise Barker has left some striking gaps (for example, she does almost nothing with Briseis's pregnancy). Hopefully she can rectify that in the next part. Rating 2.5 stars.