Anyone even just remotely familiar with the highlight reel of ancient Greek mythology is likely to recognize exactly where the author Pat Barker has placed the reader in the opening scene of her 2021 novel, The Women of Troy. The very first words of the book are “Inside the horse’s gut” and from there the description makes it clear to even those who have never seen so much as a Brad Pitt movie about the Trojan War that is no mere thoroughbred. This is the gut of the horse of history; not just the most famous horse in history, but the most famous prank in history, the enormous soldier-stuffed Trojan Horse.
For the rest of the first chapter, the only pronouns are masculine. The story of the sweaty, stinking, cramped, vomitous men the giant wooden gift secretly bears is just that: a story of men. And it won’t be a long story in Barker’s hands which already transformed the story covered in the Iliad into a feminist manifesto. The Women of Troy is the 2021 follow-up to that 2018 effort title The Silence of the Girls. As the title suggest, the girls have grown up over the interim.
Although Homer’s epic poem is the obvious inspiration for this book as well, the feminist focus is most assuredly inspired by the tragic drama written by Euripides, The Trojan Women, which covers much of the same territory and is widely considered one of the most moving portrayals of the lot faced by women during time of war ever composed.
Barker’s take on the familiar story is itself concerned with the inescapable familiarity of war in which men fight and die leaving women to pick up the pieces. Or, if they happen to be on the losing side, submit to surrender. The criticism which was leveled against the previous novel over Barker’s adoption of a modernized idioms favoring a coarse vernacular has once again become a focus of the critique of The Women of Troy. However, whereas The Silence of the Girls was met with mostly positive critical attention, the response to the follow-up has been more sharply divided. The only consensus seems to be a near-universal agreement that, alas, The Women of Troy does not rank among the esteemed, multiple award-winning author’s best work to date.
