gilda_elise | The Women of Troy (Women of Troy #2) by Pat Barker

A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it—an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy.

Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean.

It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.

Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

While perhaps not as exciting as the first book there is still much going on. And though much of this wasn’t in The Iliad, Barker allows us to get to know the characters by giving them this lull in the action. Troy has been defeated, but the Greeks are unable to sail for home due to a wind that constantly blows toward shore.

But, as in the first book, the protagonist is Briseis, given to Achilles as a war prize and now carrying his child. Wed to one of his lieutenants, she is no longer a slave, giving her more latitude in where she goes and what she does. Still, she is not exactly free. Caught between the Greeks and the Trojan women who are now slaves, she creates her own world that is part of both.

I know some readers didn’t care for the lack of action, but I found it a wonderful way to actually get to know the characters. Usually it’s battles I have to skim through, glassy-eyed from one too many deaths (it’s a rare writer who can make them interesting for me.) Here, the days pass slowly, their lives in stasis.

For the women, their homes are gone. They wait to see what will become of them.