Trojan War retold as a sprightly, well-paced bit of epic theatre

FICTION
The Women of Troy
Pat Barker
Random House, $32.99

They used to say that Euripides – one of the greatest ever dramatists – didn’t much like people, but he liked women. The Trojan Women, one of his greatest plays, shows this spectacularly: not only is it a staggering lamentation for the pains of womankind, but it provides the greatest collection of roles for women in any play before Chekhov.

You can see it done with some grandeur in Michael Cacoyannis’ 1971 film with Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba, the queen of defeated Troy; Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache, whose husband, Hector, is killed by Achilles and whose child is murdered; Genevieve Bujold as Cassandra, the clairvoyant dragged off to Agamemnon’s palace where she will be murdered; and the great Irene Papas as Helen of Troy, the woman whose abduction started it all.

Pat Barker’s costume drama in the contemporary idiom is intelligently done. Credit:

Pat Barker, who wrote the World War I Regeneration trilogy, knows what she’s buying into with her Trojan War sequence. This is her second after The Silence of the Girls, and they have as their central character Briseis, the girl Achilles and Agamemnon squabbled over in The Iliad.

There are two ways of getting at the matter of the Trojan War. You can think of everything as a footnote to the stupendous tragic clarity of The Iliad, which begins with “the wrath of Achilles is my theme” and ends with “such was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses”. You can put your money on Homer and his tragic vision at an epic scale (which is what the Greek tragedians did), or you can toy with the endless narrative elements that are summarised in Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths.

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker.

Barker is aware of the Homer tradition, but her heart belongs to the tales of the Greek sagas in this sprightly, well-paced bit of fictional epic theatre. She is an impressive successor to the pace-making bravura of Mary Renault with her Alexander the Great book The Persian Boy and its companions.

Barker begins inside the Trojan horse where Pyrrhus, Achilles’ adolescent son, is sweating it out. He emerges and proceeds to kill Priam with the utmost savagery, though the old Trojan king is almost bemused by the hero’s hapless son who barely knows what to do.

We cross to Briseis – also at the centre of The Silence of the Girls – and how she becomes involved in a brave woman’s attempt to bury Priam (a kind of Antigone in miniature). She’s also seen alongside the old and ravaged Hecuba, who is supposed to be carted off to Ithaca by Odysseus, as well as in communion with Andromache, who has lost her husband and her son and the all-but-mad Cassandra with her yellow goat-like eyes.

There’s a credible portrait of a wearied and grand Agamemnon and a rather ferret-like Odysseus. And the sense of the enduring grief and bleeding pain of the women of Troy is done powerfully and with a lightness of touch.

Barker is a nimble storyteller in the midst of atrocity. There is a comeuppance for Pyrrhus (but not the expected one). Much is made of the guest/friendship bond, just a bit improbably, and there’s plenty of the sort of satisfaction inherent in costume drama intelligently done in a contemporary idiom – not quite at the Hilary Mantel level, but not badly.

Barker is essentially a spinner of yarns, whereas her sources (all those lost plays and epics that went up in smoke with the burning of the library of Alexandria) were liable to have given concentration to a particular facet of the whole mythopoeia. Now they exist as a set of schematic surmises.

To my shame, I didn’t know how The Women of Troy would turn out. It’s difficult, though, to forget Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Andromache, when she hears her son is to be hauled to his death, says: “God hath undone me, and I cannot lift / One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.”

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