The Women of Troy

The Women of Troy is Pat Barker's 2021 novel, the sequel to The Silence of the Girls (2018) and the second volume of Barker's late-career sequence of mythic-historical novels retelling the Trojan War from the perspective of the women the Iliad does not name. The structural premise is Briseis, the former Trojan queen who was Achilles's concubine and is now (after Achilles's death at the end of The Silence of the Girls) the pregnant wife of Achilles's old friend Alcimus, narrating the days immediately after the fall of Troy. The Greek army has won and now waits on the Trojan beach for favorable winds to take them home. Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, and Helen - the women of Troy of the title - are the actual Trojan-noblewoman captives the Greek commanders have been dividing as the spoils of war. The novel runs across approximately two weeks of the waiting period.

Barker's structural method is the patient close-first-person Briseis narration with the Hecuba and the broader Trojan-noblewoman ensemble carrying the structural emotional weight that the actual Trojan War mythic-historical material serves as the structural setting for. The Pyrrhus subplot in the middle third (the seventeen-year-old son of Achilles whose post-war command of the army has produced both the actual fall of Troy in the immediate frame and Pyrrhus's growing structural moral collapse that Barker is preparing for) is the structural antagonist arc that the back-third payoff turns on. The novel reads in the patient post-Achilles register that Barker established with The Silence of the Girls and that distinguishes her project from Madeline Miller's adjacent retellings of the same mythic-historical material; Barker writes with the unblinking moral-historical seriousness her Regeneration trilogy established and that gives the novel its structural argument about how the operational mechanics of the war's aftermath produced what the Iliad does not say.

Recommended for readers of The Silence of the Girls, for fans of The Song of Achilles and Circe, and for the broader contemporary mythic-retelling subgenre. Read The Voyage Home (2024) next for the structural conclusion of Barker's project. Compare to Stone Blind (Natalie Haynes), Ariadne (Jennifer Saint), and contemporary feminist mythic-historical fiction. The Kristin Atherton audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.