The Voyage Home
by Pat Barker (2024)
Doubleday (2024)
289 pp
A few years ago Pat Barker gave us The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, the Trojan princess who became, through no desire of her own, the heart of the famous dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles that nearly ruined the Greeks’ chances for victory at Troy. I loved it and loved the follow up, The Women of Troy, focusing on the time after the destruction of Troy but before the Greeks could get wind to head home across the sea.
I was so excited when I saw Barker was continuing the story with The Voyage Home, giving us Agamemnon’s fate, with a focus on Cassandra, the Trojan princess Agamemnon has chosen as his prize, and Clytemnestra, who has so many more reasons than that to bring about the end of her marauding husband as soon after his return as possible.
Rather than tell us the story just from Clytemnestra or Cassandra’s point of view, though, Barker introduces us to another Trojan woman who suddenly finds herself without a homeland. Ritsa is not a character in the original tales, but here she acts as companion to Cassandra, who seems completely mad as she prophesies about her own doom.
Ritsa is not just a viewpoint, though. She herself is a concubine of Machaon, someone she respects a lot but whom she also hates.
The question was: did I hate him? Did I hate him enough? And the answer was yes. Oh, I admired him: the relentless hard work, the care for his patients, the compassion — and he had been kind to me, very kind, ninety per cent of the time. He’d protected me, from everybody except himself.
Still Ritsa is, it seems, there primarily to give us a perspective on Cassandra without adopting her first-person point of view. While we do get some close third-person chapters following Cassandra, I wanted more access to her thoughts and reactions, and I think Barker has been so good at providing this kind of thing elsewhere. Here, though, I felt Cassandra remained an enigma, deliberately kept on the other side of a veil throughout the narrative as she anticipates her own doom. Ritsa’s is still a rich perspective as she recognizes that Cassandra thinks her death is imminent, though, due to the curse, she doesn’t necessarily believe it: “Terrible to be so young and so wedded to death.”
There was another aspect of this book that made me like it less than I liked the previous two, and it’s stated best in a line from the book itself, as Ritsa talks of Cassandra: “She was back to being distant, determined, brisk.” That matched the tone and pacing of the book as I experienced it. We all know how this is going to end, and at times I felt like we were watching from a distance while Barker pushed on determined and brisk. I would have loved more.
That said, I still think this is a great trilogy. Indeed, I hope it turns out to be more than a trilogy. In The Voyage Home we see Elektra and Orestes watching what their parents are doing, and I’d be all for Barker taking us through the next chapter of the story in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers.
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