Moving from Homer to Virgil, Pat Barker’s second feminist reboot of the classics is a stirring adventure set amid a misogynist dystopia Pat Barker’s previous novel, _The Silence of the Girls_, retold the _Iliad _from the point of view of one of its minor characters, Briseis, a Trojan captive squabbled over by the Greek invaders who are Homer’s principal focus. By relentlessly spelling out the original myth’s grislier implications, Barker transformed a supernatural tale of wartime heroism into an ultra-realistic hellscape of female subjugation. Amid near-unanimous critical approval, a rare note of dissent was struck by the author and classicist Natalie Haynes, whose stealthily territorial _Spectator_ review marked down Barker for her “clunky anachronisms”; Haynes, it turned out, had her own feminist reboot of the _Iliad _(2019’s_ A Thousand Ships_) in the works. And yes, while _The Silence of the Girls_ can jar, not least in its determinedly 21st-century register (“reaching out”, “a real nightmare”), you couldn’t help feel that Barker had long priced in such quibbles when she set out to remake her source anew simply by dint of being as blunt as possible. It isn’t only a matter of the pungent dialogue, all “bollockings” and “gobshites”, Homer as told by Father Jack. Witness the opening to her new novel, a sequel drawn from the _Aeneid_. Airlessly crammed into their wooden horse, the Greeks are biding their time outside the gates of Troy, ready to settle unfinished business; but imagine if someone needed a shit? Such questions underpin all Barker’s effects in these books, and generate horror as well as bathos; I lost count of how many times the narrator, introducing women seized in the city’s ensuing fall, draws attention to bruised necks, wrists and mouths. The story largely unfolds as the Greeks wait to return home, bickering over the finer points of martial etiquette. Again Briseis narrates, recounting her late teens at a distance of 50 years. Present-tense segments in the third person cut at intervals to male secondary characters who, in their own ways, also find themselves wilting under macho honour codes, most importantly the young fighter Pyrrhus, overshadowed by his father, Achilles, now five months dead. Continue reading...
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