The inconclusiveness of Pat Barker’s previous novel, The Women of Troy (2021) – a sequel to 2018’s The Silence of the Girls – left the impression that it might become the middle of a trilogy, not least because she already had two previous wartime trilogies under her belt. But to judge from The Voyage Home, the third instalment in Barker’s retelling of Greek war myths through the eyes of their conquered women, she may be eyeing an even longer project. Where earlier volumes drew on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, here we turn to the domestic bloodletting recounted in the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, so plentiful in drama that Barker’s heroine in her earlier two books, the enslaved Trojan queen Briseis, doesn’t even get a look-in.
Abruptly sidelining a major player worked well for The Wire, and that kind of box-set breadth seems to be what Barker is after in The Voyage Home, with characters and themes low or high in the mix as best suits. This time, though, I’m not sure the camera is in quite the right place. The novel opens with Troy “fucking pulverised”, in the words of Greek king Agamemnon, preparing to sail home for his victory parade, which is set to be thoroughly rained on thanks to his wife, Clytemnestra – out to avenge the daughter he sacrificed to ensure the gods smiled on his war.
