The Women of Troy is the follow up to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, her imagining of the Trojan War/Iliad from the point of view of the women and girls who saw their city fall and became enslaved to their enemies. The focal point remains Briseis, pregnant with Achilles’ child, with a few chapters from the view of Achilles’ teenaged son Pyrrhus. This novel finds its characters stuck in a sort of limbo; the war is over, the Greeks victorious but unable to set sail due to the weather. The Trojan women, meanwhile, are also stuck, trying to make sense of the horrific blow that fate has sent them. Through several key characters, Pat Barker demonstrates the various ways these victims of war, rape and enslavement adjust to a life they never expected. These are women who have gone from royalty to servitude and have lost every person dear to them.
The setting for this novel is the Greek camp outside Troy just after the Greeks’ victory. The Trojan Horse has served its purpose, and Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, whom he had never met, has taken his father’s place as leader of the army. Pyrrhus is violent and successful, but he is not the esteemed hero that his father was, he knows it, and he is insecure about it. The Greeks are eager to set sail for home, but terrible high winds kick up and last for weeks on end. Naturally, the superstitious men begin to wonder what they have done to offend the gods and what they can do to win back their favor. Barker links this situation to the things that Pyrrhus has done in regards to Trojan King Priam, the manner of his death and Pyrrhus’ refusal to allow the king’s body to be buried. The latter is something that causes much discontent and sorrow among the the Trojan women.
Briseis is the Trojan princess turned war prize for Achilles. Before he died, he entrusted Briseis and his unborn child to the care of his lieutenant Alcimus, who is now essentially husband to Briseis. If you have read The Silence of the Girls (you should), or if you are familiar with the story of The Iliad, you know that Briseis, though only 19 years old, has seen saw awful stuff. She witnessed Achilles killing her husband and brothers, became Achilles slave/concubine, was handed over to the brute Agamemnon for a short time, and has watched her city and King Priam fall. The other royal women of Troy have also watched their city burn and their men perish and have become slaves/prizes for their Greek conquerors. As you can imagine, these women are traumatized, with a number of them becoming mute upon their capture. Those women and girls who had already been slaves under the Trojans are better equipped to handle this change and they adapt accordingly, but the royal women — Hecuba, Amina, Andromache, Cassandra, Helen, Briseis — all seem to have different ways of reacting to this new reality. Hecuba, Priam’s wife and Queen of Troy, and her daughter Cassandra seem to possess a strength to endure their fate but we learn that that might be because of the plans they have made for themselves. Cassandra takes a mad sort of comfort and joy in her prophecy about Agamemnon’s impending death and her own. Andromache, Hector’s wife, has had her small son murdered in addition to her husband and is a broken woman, relying on Briseis (the seasoned veteran of this new way of living) to help her with her new duties as slave/concubine to Pyrrhus. Amina, a teenager who had been a lady-in-waiting to Hecuba and witnessed Pyrrhus’ clumsy and brutal execution of Priam, is a kind of Trojan patriot who refuses to simply go along to get along. Briseis recognizes that this young woman is going to be trouble in the camp and that Amina’s response to their new life is very different from her own.
Briseis and Helen, who gets a small part in this novel, represent women whose objective is to survive. Helen is a Greek princess, married to the warrior Menelaus and taken by Paris to Troy; she is the reason for the war that lasted a decade, took hundreds of lives, and resulted in Troy’s destruction. Everyone hates Helen, both Trojans and Greeks, and the expectation is that Menelaus will kill her once he gets her back. This, of course, does not happen, which simply increases the hatred for her. Helen, when Briseis visits her, seems cool and detached as always, but upon looking more closely, Briseis can see that this woman is not unscathed. Helen seems to know that no sympathy will be accorded her, so she does not seek it. Rather, she focuses on her own survival and retreats into her work, which is embroidering tapestries — a form of storytelling. Briseis, like Helen, just wants to survive. She knows that as much as she hated Achilles and feels no love for the child inside her, it is because of them that she is not only alive but treated with respect amongst the Greeks. Briseis, like Helen, is pragmatic and tries to forge a new life despite all the tragedy she has known.
The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy are excellent and imaginative novels, which, despite the mythical subject matter, are rooted in the realities of war. As mentioned in my review of The Silence of the Girls, Briseis and many other female characters do not put faith in the gods. Their tenuous position as women and as Trojans forces them to face and learn to deal with violence, loss, and eviction from their homeland. It’s the kind of story that has happened and continues to happen all around the world.