CANR
WORK TITLE: The Voyage Home
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Durham
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
LAST VOLUME: CANR 261
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 8, 1943, in Thornaby-on-Tees, England; daughter of Moyra Barker; married David Barker (a professor of zoology; died January, 2009), January 29, 1978; children: John, Anna Ralph.
EDUCATION:London School of Economics and Political Science, B.Sc., 1965.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked as teacher in England, 1965-70.
MEMBER:Society of Authors, PEN.
AWARDS:Named one of Britain’s twenty best young writers by the Book Marketing Society, 1982; Fawcett Prize, Fawcett Society, 1982, for Union Street; Special Award, Northern Electric Arts Awards, 1993; London Guardian Fiction Prize, 1993, for The Eye in the Door; Booker Prize for fiction, 1995, for The Ghost Road; honorary M.Litt., University of Teesside, 1993; honorary fellow, L.S.E., 1996; honorary D.Litt., Napier, 1996, Hertfordshire, 1998, and Durham, 1998; honorary doctorate, Open University, 1997; decorated Commander of the British Empire, 2000; fellow, Royal Society of Literature; honorary Fellow of the British Academy, 2024.
WRITINGS
Union Street was adapted as the feature film Stanley & Iris, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1989, starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda; Regeneration was adapted as a film of the same title, 1997, directed by Gillies MacKinnon, starring Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, and Jonny Lee Miller.
SIDELIGHTS
Pat Barker is among the most acclaimed writers to emerge from England in the 1980s. Her novels—among them Union Street, Blow Your House Down, Double Vision, and her “Regeneration Trilogy” novels concerning World War I—have earned praise for both their spare, direct prose and their depictions of working-class life. Once in danger of being labeled merely a feminist writer for her stories of struggling women in industrial England, Barker has since earned praise as a voice for the human condition in general. “It has been Pat Barker’s accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel,” noted Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker. Pierpont described Barker as “an energetic writer who achieves much of her purpose through swift and easy dialogue and the bold etching of personality—effects so apparently simple and forthright that the complications of feeling which arise seem to do so unbidden.”
Barker’s first three published novels draw upon her memories of working-class women of her mother’s and grandmother’s generations. She grew up in Thornaby-on-Tees, an industrial town in the north of England. Union Street, Barker’s first novel, concerns seven neighboring women near a factory in northeast England. Life for these women is trying and unrewarding. Some of them are married to alcoholics; some of them are victims of spousal abuse; all of them seem resigned to suffering. Meredith Tax, writing in the Village Voice, described the novel’s characters as “women who have given up on love.” Tax added, however, that Barker “dramatizes the strength of her working-class people without sentimentality, for she knows the way they participate in their own victimization.” Tax added that the various women in Union Street experience growth and strength through their suffering, noting that the novel’s “point is life, and how rich and hard it is, and the different ways people have of toughing it through the pain without being crushed.”
Many critics praised Union Street. Ivan Gold, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Barker’s “pungent, raunchy … dialogue” alternates “with passages of fine understated wit,” called Union Street a “first-rate first novel.” Likewise, Eileen Fairweather wrote in the New Statesman that “Barker may have written the latest, long over-due working-class masterpiece.” Elizabeth Ward wrote in the Washington Post Book World that “Barker achieves immediate distinction with Union Street. ” Ward added that though “the book’s vision … is of a life brutal and scabrous in the extreme,” Barker nonetheless includes “a flicker of affirmation” for each of the main characters. Ward called Union Street “a singularly powerful achievement.” A film version of the book, released as Stanley & Iris, was produced in 1989, starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda.
Barker enjoyed further acclaim with her next novel, Blow Your House Down. Like Union Street, this second novel details events in the lives of several women in working-class, industrial England. Unlike the women in Union Street, though, the characters in Blow Your House Down are prostitutes, and their problems include not only those of the women in Union Street —notably abuse and financial insecurity—but also survival in a red- light district frequented by a vicious, Jack the Ripper-style killer.
Many reviewers praised Blow Your House Down as a gripping account of life in a gloomy industrial town. Encounter critic James Lasdun noted: “Pat Barker has an impressive feel for the starkness of English working- class existence at its roughest end.” Lasdun cited Barker’s “perfect ear for dialogue” and called her second novel “disturbingly convincing.”
The Century’s Daughter, Barker’s third novel, offers further insights into the hardships of being a woman in industrial England. The story’s protagonist is Liza Jarrett Wright, an octogenarian who recounts her life to Steven, a homosexual social worker who befriends her while trying to move her from a doomed neighborhood. Liza tells Steven of her childhood spent in poverty and neglect. She also recalls her son, killed during World War II, and her promiscuous daughter, whose child Liza raised herself. Comparing The Century’s Daughter to Barker’s preceding novels, reviewers found it more sentimental but equally compelling.
In a 1992 Village Voice interview, Barker admitted that the success of her first three novels led her to fear that she was being “boxed in” by public expectations. “I had become strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working-class feminist … label, label, label,” she commented. “You get to the point where people are reading the label instead of the book.” Not one to accept such limitations, Barker extended her imaginative reach and entered the world of the male psyche. The Man Who Wasn’t There tells the story of Colin, a fatherless teenager who concocts fantasies about himself and his absent parent in an effort to alleviate the silent grief he feels. London Times Literary Supplement reviewer Kathleen Jamie praised the book for its authentic vision of postwar Britain. “Pat Barker’s talent is for people, period and dialogue; and in Colin she perfectly creates the mind of a 1950s twelve-year-old, a latch-key kid,” Jamie wrote.
Barker turned to the history of World War I and wrote a trilogy of novels about mentally ill soldiers and the therapist who struggles with his own moral values while treating them. The first volume of the trilogy, the 1992 book Regeneration, drew a wealth of acclaim on both continents. Based on actual people and events, the novel follows Royal Welch Fusiliers hero Siegfried Sassoon through his “treatment” at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1917. Sassoon has been sent to Craiglockhart after writing a letter denouncing his country’s political motives in the conflict and refusing to suffer anymore agonies on behalf of an ungrateful nation. His case is taken up by Dr. William H.R. Rivers, an army psychologist who soon realizes the similarities between the stresses suffered by trench soldiers and those experienced by poor women on the home front.
The Eye in the Door continues the saga of Dr. Rivers and his shell-shocked patients, this time focusing on a bisexual lieutenant named Billy Prior—a wholly fictional creation of Barker’s—who suffers from “bouts of amnesia.” Voiceless as well as without any memory of a six-day period during which he was injured at the front and taken to a military hospital, Prior nonetheless exhibits a raw intelligence that belies his working-class roots. Familiar with Rivers’s work, Prior asks the noted psychologist to hypnotize him, a request that results in the shell-shocked officer’s recall of the destruction of his fellow soldiers—the result of an enemy shell—and his futile attempts to gather their scattered remains back inside the trench. During the healing process that follows the return of his memory, Prior works in the London Intelligence Office, awaiting his return to the front as a test-case for Rivers—will the glue hold? Will he be able to withstand yet another glimpse of such horror? Meanwhile, through their interaction during Prior’s therapy, Rivers and his patient begin to change roles: the psychologist becomes patient, gradually allowing himself to experience feelings of caring and empathy with regard to his patient that he had previously closed off out of necessity. The Eye in the Door “succeeds as both historical fiction and as sequel,” wrote Jim Shepard in the New York Times Book Review. “Its research and speculation combine to produce a kind of educated imagination that is persuasive and illuminating about this particular place and time.”
The third novel in the World War I trilogy, The Ghost Road, was published in 1995 and received that year’s Booker Prize for fiction. Both Rivers and Prior return, with Rivers now employed at a hospital in London and Prior, now fully recovered, on his way back to the battlefront. Interspersed with his current activities at the hospital are the doctor’s recollections of a period, a decade before the war, that he spent on Eddystone Island, in Melanesia. While looking around him now at a country peopled by shattered souls and battered bodies, its buildings bombed, and a sense of despair permeating the air, Rivers recalls that a decade earlier, the old, sick, and infirm were no longer grouped with the living but were said to be traveling the “ghost road.” Prior, the reader soon realizes, is also traveling such a road; his trip back to the front will ultimately prove fatal. The journey back into the trenches is somehow preordained, its inexorableness juxtaposed with a meeting with poet Wilfred Owen—himself an actual casualty of the Great War—when the author gives the poet voice: “At night you get the sense of something ancient. … It’s as if all other wars had somehow … distilled themselves into this war, and that makes it something you … almost can’t challenge.”
The brutal, sometimes graphically unpleasant aspects of the novel fascinated several critics, particularly because they had come from the pen of a female author. Commenting on Barker’s self-confessed bluntness in dealing with the “masculine” facets of human behavior that reflect the violence of war, New Yorker contributor Blake Morrison noted that “there is at times something very 1990s and predictable about her preoccupation with gender, emasculation, bisexuality, and role reversals.” However, Morrison concluded, Barker’s ultimate focus on the parallels drawn by Rivers between primitive Melanesian society and civilized England draws the novel—the close of the trilogy—toward the timeless. “Whatever the waste of human life,” Morrison posited, “isn’t war fundamental to the human spirit? It’s a dark and distinctly un-nineties thought with which to end this complex trilogy.” London Times Literary Supplement reviewer Peter Parker noted that The Ghost Road “amply fulfills the high expectations raised by its predecessors,” and concluded of the novel that it is “startlingly good … in its own right.”
“Here is another of [Barker’s] descents into hell,” wrote Spectator critic Jane Gardam of the author’s 2001 offering, Border Crossing. In this novel, Barker explores what Gardam termed “the genesis of evil” through the development of the relationship between doctor and patient. Tom Seymour, one of the book’s two protagonists, is an unhappily married psychologist who specializes in children’s issues. During a walk along the banks of the Tyne River, Tom and his wife witness a man attempting to kill himself by jumping into the water. After he rescues the man, Tom learns that he is in fact a former patient: Danny Miller, who, after murdering an elderly woman at age ten, was sent to prison based on Tom’s expert testimony at trial. Danny has emerged from prison thirteen years later as “a successful product of the system,” according to New Criterion reviewer Brooke Allen, “startlingly attractive and intelligent” but “also clearly damaged” by his experiences. Danny asks Tom to take him on as a patient, in order to help the younger man analyze and resolve his childhood traumas. Once the sessions begin, however, Tom becomes too close to his patient, and, as Gardam noted, their relationship “crystallises into a confrontation, a duet, between good and evil.” While the Library Journal contributor Wilda Williams felt that “the novel falls flat at the end, leaving the reader disappointed and dissatisfied,” Allen commented that “ Border Crossing is emotionally affecting and sophisticated, and poses, as well, a tormenting and almost insoluble philosophical challenge.”
In Barker’s tenth novel, Double Vision, the characters grapple with personal grief and loss caused by violence. The novel’s protagonist, Kate Frobisher, is a sculptor and recent widow suffering from injuries caused by a car accident. Her husband, Ben, a photojournalist, was killed by a sniper bullet in Afghanistan. Stephen Sharkey, a journalist and friend of her husband, discovers that his wife is having an affair as he watches the Twin Towers collapse. Stephen is also suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome from covering conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda. After his divorce, Stephen moves in with his brother, whose home is not far from Kate’s.
“This may all sound too neat, but it’s not,” remarked Library Journal reviewer Barbara Hoffert. She concluded that Barker “shows how tightly bound we are and how our actions reverberate; every step is fraught with consequence.”
In Life Class, Barker takes another look at the post-Edwardian society of England during World War I. Life Class, declared New Yorker contributor Kennedy Fraser, “introduces a triangle of young people: Paul Tarrant, [a] hybrid from a working-class family on Teesside, but with a property-owning grandmother who left him some money; Kit Neville, brought up in an Edwardian world of cooks and nannies but with a painting style already evolved and more modern, by light-years, than those of his contemporaries; and Elinor Brooke, a girl from a family straight out of Forster or Saki, but committed to her integrity as an artist and her freedom as a woman.”
At the time the novel—and the war—opens, the three are at London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Arts, where they share the attentions of (real-life) instructor Henry Tonks. Tonks, the author told Tim Peters in a Publishers Weekly interview, was “a practicing artist—as all Slade teachers had to be—and a good one, but his real genius was for teaching. Henry Tonks was the Slade, and his high standards and exacting eye are fixed reference points around which the fictional characters revolve.” Soon after the war begins, Paul volunteers for duty as an ambulance driver, an occupation that opens him to the effect modern mechanized warfare can have on the human body. “Barker’s focus serves a clear didactic purpose,” declared reviewer Lara Tupper, writing for the Believer Web site. “How can art continue in a time of war? It can persist, the novel suggests, in the precise and vivid rendering of war’s effects. In Ypres, Paul’s new model is a wounded soldier, portrayed in one painting as a ‘blob of tortured nerves.’” “Despite the fact that Elinor and her ilk deem this subject matter inappropriate,” Tupper continued, Paul argues that the images serve a vitally important purpose: they capture the experience of warfare on a visceral level, perhaps even communicating to the folks at home what the soldier’s experience is like. “The irony, of course, is that once he discovers his real subject,” Yvonne Zipp stated in the Christian Science Monitor, “it turns out to be too difficult for most people to look at.” “Barker never pushes the contemporary allusions here, but these are questions with tragic relevance for us,” wrote Ron Charles in the Washington Post Book World. “At a time when we’re encouraged to go on with our lives and photographers are banned from showing coffins returning from Iraq, what images of war and its ravages are appropriate? The lessons in Life Class aren’t easy, but they’re deeply affecting and necessary.”
With its backdrop of life during World War I, Life Class invites comparisons with Barker’s “Regeneration Trilogy,” based on both its similarities to and its differences from the earlier works. “After writing The Ghost Road, ” her Booker Prize- winning conclusion to the trilogy, declared Al Hutchison in the Tampa Tribune, “Barker has gently veered away from the subject of shell shock while remaining focused on the often-dangerous behavior of victims of one kind or another and the pain they inflict on others.” “‘I feel this book is not linked to the trilogy so much as it’s linked to Double Vision, ’ her previous novel, which is set in post-9/11 England,” wrote Alden Mudge, quoting the author in an interview for the Bookpage Web site. Mudge quoted Barker again: “One of the things Double Vision is about is how you represent real horrors in a way which isn’t exploitative, or disrespectful of people’s suffering, or damaging. While I was writing that book, I was very aware that the people I didn’t mention in earlier books were the people who painted the landscape of the Western Front. I wanted to continue with that theme.” “As she did in her ‘Regeneration’ trilogy, Ms. Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of the war and its fallout with meticulous precision,” concluded Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. “Grievously injured soldiers crying out for morphine that does not exist; field surgeons tossing bits of damaged flesh into buckets; civilians scurrying for safety as bombs torpedo their homes and gardens … such images and the ineradicable memory of these sights are captured with unsparing clarity by Ms. Barker in these pages, as are the less visible scars they leave on the psyches of soldiers, doctors and witnesses alike.”
Barker returns to the characters of Life Class —and its theme of the role of art in war—with Toby’s Room, a novel that book ends the events of its predecessor. In this volume Elinor has determined that since women are not part of the political world, her art and life should have nothing to do with the war—until her brother Toby goes missing at the front. Professor Henry Tonks, on the other hand, finds himself a chronicler of the war’s devastating effects, as he sketches soldiers with facial wounds to aid pioneering plastic surgeons.
Reviewers praised Toby’s Room as another compelling exploration of the issues that haunt so many of Barker’s works. “Can people ever move on?” asked Freya Johnston in the London Telegraph. “Elinor is vexed by precisely that question; perhaps Barker, given how long she has now dwelt on and in wartime, is beginning to feel the same way. Yet her prose remains fresh, humanely business-like, crisp and unsentimental. Images are scrupulously vivid, and the plot has real momentum.” Johnston added that “if Elinor seems insubstantial, it may be in part because this novel is about the impossibility and necessity of surviving your double.”
Hermione Lee, in a review for the London Guardian, called Barker’s depiction of the patients the novel’s “tour de force” and added: “Barker makes us see, with steadiness and without sensationalism, the men with no eyes, the men with no mouths, the men with no jaws, men whose tongues stick out through holes in their cheeks, men who are being patched up and operated on ‘and sent on their way with whatever the surgeons had managed to supply by way of a face’.” Lee continued: “For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue—in her plain, steady, compelling voice—to be turned into art.”
“As well as the more monumental themes, Barker conveys ordinary lives with skill,” remarked Leyla Sanai in the London Independent. “Barker is astute about emotions that don’t conform to society’s expectations. Elinor’s initial response to the news of Toby’s death is ‘a blaze of euphoria’, capturing the surge of paradoxical energy that can accompany denial, and reminding us of the disparate forms that early grief may take.” Sanai concluded: “Barker has shown again that she is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature.”
New York Times Book Review contributor John Vernon asserted that “ Toby’s Room takes large risks. It’s dark, painful and indelibly grotesque, yet it’s also tender. It strains against its own narrative control to create, in the midst of ordinary life, a kind of deformed reality—precisely to illustrate how everything we call ‘ordinary’ is disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly.”
In an interview with CA, the author recalled that she turned to writing her “gritty” and “realistic” works after failing to sell a series of middle-class novels of manners. She was encouraged to explore her own background by the author Angela Carter, who read a Barker work-in-progress during a writer’s conference. Barker once told CA: “I think along with the desire to write about the sort of environment I’d grown up with came a desire to write, initially at least, more about women because I felt that, although the men in that environment had also been deprived of a voice, and were not being given any kind of public recognition of their experiences of life, the women had been in a way still more deprived. … I was writing about the most silenced section of our society.”
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Closing out the “Life Class Trilogy” with the 2015 Noonday, Barker writes about World War II for the first time. Former Slade School of Fine Arts classmates Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville are in London during the Blitz in 1940. Now married and middle-aged, they struggle to advance their artistic pursuits. Paul is an air raid warden, Elinor drives an ambulance, and Kit leaves his wife and daughter in America and arrives in London to work for the Ministry of Information as a German translator. As Paul and Elinor’s marriage fails, Paul has an affair with a fellow air raid warden, and Elinor grieves her mother’s death and is still haunted by an incestuous relationship with her brother who died in the first war. Disfigured during the Great War, Kit has a one-night stand with Elinor, dredging up memories of the past.
“All this leaves the novel delicately poised, halfway between an endlessly reconstituted past and a shrapnel-strewn present where tragedy and banality go hand in hand,” declared D. J. Taylor in Spectator. “Barker searingly re-creates a wartime landscape in which the apocalyptic has become routine,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer, who added that “Barker is as subtle and tough-minded here about human nature as in all her work.” Writing in Times Literary Supplement, critic Mika Ross-Southall noted: “Noonday is, as its title suggests, full of chiaroscuro; light (and life) is harsh [where] Barker has fast-forwarded the lives of the three central characters.”
Barker launched the “Troy” series about the legendary women of the Iliad and the Trojan War, with The Silence of the Girls in 2018. With a female perspective, the book focuses on Briseis, Queen of Lyrnessus, taken prisoner by the Greeks and gifted to Achilles, and how she builds connections among her fellow female prisoners. When Agamemnon steals Briseis, Achilles’ lover Patrocles fights in Achilles’ stead and dies, launching Achilles’ well-known withdrawal from the Greek’s cause. Barker offers a revisionist history of the war from the points of view of the concubines and nurses. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Barker explained that Briseis’s plotline represents the most dramatic story in The Iliad—she’s a queen one day and a slave the next. At the heart of the book, “It’s tracing the steps Briseis takes in order to recover and be a person again.”
Despite the jarring used of British contemporary slang, “this remains a suspenseful and moving illumination of women’s fates in wartime,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews critic also noticed the awkward Briticisms, and the mistakenly Roman inventions attributed to the Greeks, yet “Barker’s innovation rests in the female perspective, something she wove masterfully into her Regeneration and Life Class trilogies.” Calling the book “a masterful and moving novel,” a reviewer in The Economist praised the refreshingly modern take on the Trojan war’s women: “They are bawdy, motherly, angry and abused. They keep watch on the men who killed their relatives …Domestic details are piercingly described, bringing the squalor of the camp to life.”
In the follow-up, The Women of Troy, the Greeks deploy their famous wooden horse into the gates of Troy, Achilles dies, and his son Pyrrhus fears he will never live up to his famous father. Victorious, the Greek try to return home with their spoils, including Troy’s women, but their ships have no wind and are stalled, because the gods are offended that Trojan King Priam was killed in front of an altar and his body desecrated. Queen Briseis, Achilles’ slave, is pregnant, and after his death was given in marriage to his comrade Alcimus. Though now protected with status, she counsels other women: vengeance-obsessed old Hecuba, traumatized Andromache, Hector’s wife Andromache, prophet Cassandra, and Helen, whose beauty started the war.
“Briseis is an engaging character, both pragmatic and perceptive, providing keen insight into monsters such as Pyrrhus,” according to Bethany Latham in Booklist. Acknowledging the anachronistic language, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that it is used “to illuminate characters living at the dawn of myth. Barker’s latest is a wonder.”
The final book of the trilogy, The Voyage Home, focuses on King Prima’s daughter Cassandra, now concubine to the brutal Agamemnon. On their journey back to Greece, Cassandra envisions not only her death but also Agamemnon at the hands of his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia for fair winds to sail home, but Cassandra’s prophecies fall on deaf ears. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Barker suffuses the wrenching narrative with the women’s simmering contempt for the men who rule their world”; while Brian Martin remarked in Spectator that Barker “takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism.” In Times Literary Supplement, Peter Kemp said: “the trilogy that The Voyage Home concludes stands out as the work of a novelist matchless in her imaginative and informed response to war.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Barker, Pat, The Ghost Road, Viking (London, England), 1995, Dutton (New York, NY), 1996.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 32, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.
PERIODICALS
American Prospect, April 9, 2001, Mark Greif, review of Border Crossing, pp. 36-39.
Book, March, 2001, Chris Barsanti, review of Border Crossing, p. 81.
Booklist, March 1, 1999, Brad Hooper, review of Another World, p. 1150; March 1, 2001, Nancy Pearl, review of Border Crossing, p. 1225; December 1, 2003, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Double Vision; August 1, 2012, Brad Hooper, review of Toby’s Room, p. 36; June 1 2021, Bethany Latham, review of The Women of Troy, p. 47.
Boston Globe, January 27, 2008, Gail Caldwell, “Young Lovers Learn to Say Goodbye to All That.”
Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2008, Yvonne Zipp, “Art, Love, and One Giant War,” p. 16; September 29, 2012, Brock Clarke, review of Toby’s Room.
Commonweal, May 9, 2008, “Over There,” p. 28.
Contemporary Literature, September 22, 2005, “An Interview with Pat Barker,” p. 366.
Economist, March 10, 2001, review of Border Crossing, p. 7; August 23, 2003, review of Double Vision, p. 69; September 15, 2018, review of The Silence of the Girls, p. 89.
Encounter, September- October, 1984, James Lasdun, review of Blow Your House Down.
English Review, September, 1999, Philippa Caldicott, review of Another World, p. 18.
Entertainment Weekly, December 3, 2003, Lisa Schwarzbaum, “Mourning After,” p. 103; February 1, 2008, Tina Jordan, review of Life Class, p. 78.
Esquire, April, 2001, Sven Birkets, review of Border Crossing, p. 56.
Financial Times, July 21, 2007, “Pat Barker—Drawing Blood as the Bestselling Novelist Returns to the First World War Territory That Made Her Name, She Tells Rosie Blau That All Conflict Resonates through the Ages,” p. 12; July 28, 2007, “War Paint Pat Barker Brings to Life the Experience of the First World War for a Group of Students Who Can’t—or Won’t—Take Up Arms,” p. 36.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), August 23, 2003, review of Double Vision, p. D3.
Guardian (London, England), July 7, 2007, D.J. Taylor, “A Spattered Canvas: Pat Barker’s Life Class Sutures Art and Battlefront Surgery in 1914”; August 10, 2012, Hermione Lee, review of Toby’s Room.
Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2004, “Pains Large and Small,” p. 19; March 23, 2008, “A Different Side of WWI; British Novelist Looks at War through the Eyes of Artists,” p. 20.
Hudson Review, winter, 2000, Dean Flower, review of Another World, p. 657.
Independent (London, England), September 16, 2012, Leyla Sanai, review of Toby’s Room.
International Herald Tribune, January 25, 2008, Christopher Benfey, “Tales of Art and War, but Mostly the Turmoil of Love.”
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2003, review of Double Vision, pp. 1237- 1239; October 15, 2007, review of Life Class; September 15, 2012, review of Toby’s Room; January 1, 2016, review of Noonday; July 15, 2018, review of The Silence of the Girls.
Library Journal, April 15, 1999, Wilda Williams, review of Another World, p. 142; April 1, 2001, Wilda Williams, review of Border Crossing, p. 131; November 1, 2003, Barbara Hoffert, review of Double Vision, p. 121; November 15, 2007, Wilda Williams, review of Life Class, p. 48.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 5, 2008, review of Life Class.
New Criterion, May, 1999, Brooke Allen, review of Another World, p. 74; May, 2001, Brooke Allen, “Blurring the Borders,” pp. 62- 66.
New Statesman, May 14, 1982, Eileen Fairweather, review of Union Street; September 8, 2003, Christina Lamb, “Battle Scars,” review of Double Vision, p. 53; July 16, 2007, “The Art of War,” p. 64.
New Yorker, August 10, 1992, Claudia Roth Pierpont, review of Regeneration, pp. 74-76; January 22, 1996, Blake Morrison, review of The Ghost Road, pp. 78-82; March 17, 2008, Kennedy Fraser, “Ghost Writer,” p. 41.
New York Review of Books, February 15, 1996, “The Eye in the Door,” pp. 19- 21; May 20, 1999, Gabriele Annan, review of Another World, p. 28; May 17, 2001, Gabriele Annan, review of Border Crossing, p. 44.
New York Times, February 29, 2008, Michiko Kakutani, “Exploring Small Stories of the Great War,” p. 31.
New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1983, Ivan Gold, review of Union Street; May 15, 1994, Jim Shepard, review of The Eye in the Door, p. 9; December 14, 2003, Neil Gordon, review of Double Vision, p. 12; December 18, 2003, Joyce Carol Oates, review of Double Vision, p. 78.
Observer (London, England), May 5, 2002, review of Border Crossing, p. 18; October 5, 2012, John Vernon, review of Toby’s Room.
O, the Oprah Magazine, January 1, 2004, “Love in a Time of Conflict: A Tense, Hypnotic New Novel Probes the Triumph of Spirit over Hate,” p. 94.
Publishers Weekly, February 15, 1999, review of Another World, p. 83; January 22, 2001, review of Border Crossing, p. 300; August 17, 2003, review of Double Vision, p. 18; October 22, 2007, review of Life Class, p. 34; November 12, 2007, Tim Peters, “PW Talks with Pat Barker: War as a Human Experience,” p. 34; August 6, 2012, review of Toby’s Room, p. 26; July 9, 2018, review of The Silence of the Girls, pl. 64; August 13, 2018, Hope Reese, “Women of Troy,” p. 42; June 7, 2021, review of The Women of Troy, p. 35.
St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), January 27, 2008, “The Great War Comes Home at Last,” p. 11.
San Francisco Chronicle, January 27, 2008, Kathryn Crim, “Art of War Takes Its Toll on Artists in Pat Barker’s Life Class. ”
Seattle Times, January 25, 2008, “Artists in a Time of War.”
Spectator, November 21, 1998, Helen Osborne, review of Another World, p. 49; March 31, 2001, Jane Gardam, review of Border Crossing, p. 47; August 20, 2003, Anita Brookner, “Calm after the Storm,” review of Double Vision, p. 29; November 10, 2003, review of Double Vision, p. 42; August 4, 2007, “The School of Hard Knocks,” p. 33; September 1, 2012, Richard Davenport-Hines, “Brotherly Love,” p. 34; August 29, 2015, D.J. Taylor, review of Noonday, p. 34; August 17, 2024, Brian Martin, review of The Voyage Home, p. 38.
Star Tribune, January 27, 2008, “Art Students in 1914 London Become Entangled in Love Affairs That Are Tested by the Trials of War,” p. 17.
Telegraph (London, England), September 3, 2012, Freya Johnston, review of Toby’s Room.
Sunday Times (London, England), July 1, 2007, Peter Kemp, “Pat Barker’s Last Battle?”; July 8, 2007, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, review of Life Class.
Tampa Tribune, March 30, 2008, Al Hutchison, “Battlefield Horrors Interrupt Love Story,” p. 12.
Time, June 7, 1999, Elizabeth Gleick, review of Another World, p. 82; December 22, 2003, “The Weight of the World: Pat Barker Looks Everywhere for the Answer to the Enigma of Evil. Maybe She Looks in Too Many Places,” p. 125; July 7, 2007, Ben Macintyre, “Barker Uses Three Artists’ Lives to Bear Witness to the Brutality of the Trenches.”
Times Literary Supplement (London, England), April 14, 1989, Kathleen Jamie, review of The Man Who Wasn’t There, p. 404; September 8, 1995, Peter Parker, review of The Ghost Road; October 23, 1998, Carol Birch, review of Another World, p. 25; March 30, 2001, Robert MacFarlane, review of Border Crossing, p. 24; August 29, 2003, Michael Caines, “News from the Burning City: Pat Barker’s Vivid Variations on War, Memory, and Present Suffering,” review of Double Vision, p. 19; July 6, 2007, “Things We Choose to Love: The Further Artistic Battles of Pat Barker,” p. 23; October 9, 2015, Mika Ross-Southall, review of Noonday, p. 23; August 23, 2024, Peter Kemp, review of The Voyage Home, p. 19.
Union-Tribune Books (San Diego, CA), February 3, 2008, Gregory Leon Miller, “The Not-So- Great War: Pat Barker Expertly Delves into Idealism, Disillusionment in Life Class.”
Village Voice, December 6, 1983, Meredith Tax, review of Union Street; July 14, 1992, interview and review of Regeneration, p. 91.
Washington Post Book World, September 18, 1983, Elizabeth Ward, review of Union Street; January 27, 2008, Ron Charles, “The Art of War: Pat Barker’s Latest Novel Follows a Group of Painters through World War I.”
Women’s Review of Books, September, 1999, E.J. Graff, review of Another World, p. 5; July 1, 2004, “Rendering Truth,” p. 14.
ONLINE
AllReaders.com, http:/ /www.allreaders.com/ (August 28, 2008), Matthew McAllister, review of Another World.
Asylum, http:// theasylum.wordpress.com/ (August 28, 2008), John Shelf, review of Life Class.
Believer, http:// www.believermag.com/ (August 28, 2008), Lara Tupper, review of Life Class.
Bookpage, http:// www.bookpage.com/ (August 28, 2008), Alden Mudge, “The Suffering of Others: Pat Barker’s Vivid Portrait of the Face of War”; Robert Weibezahl, review of Another World.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (August 28, 2008), Kathy Weissman, review of Life Class.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (August 28, 2008), Amanda Cuda, review of Double Vision.
Doubleday Web site, http://doubleday.com/ (August 28, 2008), author interview.
Novel World, http:// novelworld.squarespace.com/ (August 28, 2008), review of Life Class.*
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (December 2024), review of The Voyage Home.
Pat Barker
UK flag (b.1943)
Pat Barker is one of England's most important contemporary novelists. Union Street, her first novel, was published by Virago in 1982 to huge critical acclaim. Barker won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1993 and the Booker Prize in 1995. She lives in Durham.
Awards: Booker (1995) see all
Genres: Historical, Literary Fiction
Series
Regeneration Trilogy
1. Regeneration (1991)
2. The Eye in the Door (1993)
3. The Ghost Road (1995)
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Brooke Family
1. Life Class (2007)
2. Toby's Room (2012)
3. Noonday (2015)
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Troy
1. The Silence of the Girls (2018)
2. The Women of Troy (2021)
3. The Voyage Home (2024)
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Novels
Union Street (1982)
Blow Your House Down (1984)
Liza's England (1986)
aka The Century's Daughter
The Man Who Wasn't There (1989)
Another World (1998)
Border Crossing (2001)
Double Vision (2003)
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Non fiction hide
War Talk (2005)
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Pat Barker
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Irish professor of accounting, see Pat Barker (academic).
Pat Barker
CBE, FRSL, FBA
Pat Barker in October 2012
Pat Barker in October 2012
Born Patricia Mary W. Drake
8 May 1943 (age 81)
Thornaby-on-Tees, North Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation Novelist
Alma mater London School of Economics
Subject Memory, trauma, survival, recovery
Notable works Regeneration Trilogy
Notable awards Booker Prize, Guardian First Book Award
Spouse David Barker
Children 2
Patricia Mary W. Barker, CBE, FRSL, Hon FBA (née Drake; born 8 May 1943) is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. She is known for her Regeneration Trilogy, published in the 1990s, and, more recently, a series of books set during the Trojan War, starting with The Silence of the Girls in 2018.
Early life and education
Patricia Mary W. Drake[1] was born on 8 May 1943[2] to a working-class family in Thornaby-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England.[3] Her mother Moyra died in 2000;[2] her father's identity is unknown. According to The Times, Moyra became pregnant "after a drunken night out while in the Wrens." In a social climate where illegitimacy was regarded with shame, she told people that the resulting child was her sister, rather than her daughter. They lived with Barker's grandmother Alice and step-grandfather William, until her mother married and moved out when Barker was seven.[4] Barker could have joined her mother, she told The Guardian in 2003, but chose to stay with her grandmother "because of love of her, and because my stepfather didn't warm to me, nor me to him."[2] Her grandparents ran a fish and chip shop which failed and the family was, she told The Times in 2007, "poor as church mice; we were living on National Assistance – 'on the pancrack', as my grandmother called it."[4]
At the age of eleven, Barker won a place at grammar school, attending King James Grammar School in Knaresborough and Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton-on-Tees.[5]
Barker, who says she has always been an avid reader, studied international history at the London School of Economics from 1962-65.[6] After graduating in 1965, she returned home to nurse her grandmother, who died in 1971.
Career
Early work
Barker has written many novels.[7] In her mid-twenties, Barker began to write fiction. Her first three novels were never published and, she told The Guardian in 2003, "didn't deserve to be: I was being a sensitive lady novelist, which is not what I am. There's an earthiness and bawdiness in my voice.”[2]
Her first published novel was Union Street (1982), which consisted of seven interlinked stories about English working class women whose lives are circumscribed by poverty and violence.[citation needed] For ten years, the manuscript was rejected by publishers as too "bleak and depressing."[8] Barker met novelist Angela Carter at an Arvon Foundation writers' workshop. Carter liked the book, telling Barker "if they can't sympathise with the women you're creating, then sod their fucking luck," and suggested she send the manuscript to feminist publisher Virago, which accepted it.[2] The New Statesman hailed the novel as a "long overdue working class masterpiece,"[2] and The New York Times Book Review commented Barker "gives the sense of a writer who has enormous power that she has scarcely had to tap to write a first-rate first novel."[9] Union Street was later adapted as the Hollywood film Stanley & Iris (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda. Barker has said the film bears little resemblance to her book.[citation needed] As of 2003, the novel remained one of Virago's top sellers.[2]
Barker's first three published novels – Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza's England (1986; originally published as The Century's Daughter) – depicted the lives of working-class women in Yorkshire. BookForum magazine described them as "full of feeling, violent and sordid, but never exploitative or sensationalistic and rarely sentimental."[10] Blow Your House Down portrays prostitutes living in a North of England city, who are being stalked by a serial killer.[11] Liza's England, described by the Sunday Times as a "modern-day masterpiece," tracks the life of a working-class woman born at the dawn of the 20th century.[12]
Regeneration Trilogy
Following the publication of Liza's England, Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992.[8] She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".[13]
Therefore, she turned her attention to the First World War, which she had always wanted to write about due to her step-grandfather's wartime experiences. Wounded by a bayonet and left with a scar, he would not speak about the war.[8] She was inspired to write what is now known as the Regeneration Trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—a set of novels that explore the history of the First World War by focusing on the aftermath of trauma. The books are an unusual blend of history and fiction, and Barker draws extensively on the writings of First World War poets and W.H.R. Rivers, an army doctor who worked with traumatised soldiers. The main characters are based on historical figures, such as Robert Graves, Alice and Hettie Roper (pseudonyms for Alice Wheeldon and her daughter Hettie) with the exception of Billy Prior, whom Barker invented to parallel and contrast with British soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. As the central fictional character, Billy Prior is in all three books.[14]
“I think the whole British psyche is suffering from the contradiction you see in Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, where the war is both terrible and never to be repeated and at the same time experiences derived from it are given enormous value," Barker told The Guardian. "No one watches war films in quite the way the British do."[15]
Barker told freelance journalist Wera Reusch "I think there is a lot to be said for writing about history, because you can sometimes deal with contemporary dilemmas in a way people are more open to because it is presented in this unfamiliar guise, they don't automatically know what they think about it, whereas if you are writing about a contemporary issue on the nose, sometimes all you do is activate people's prejudices. I think the historical novel can be a backdoor into the present which is very valuable."[16]
The Regeneration Trilogy was extremely well received by critics, with Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times describing it as "brilliant, intense and subtle",[17] and Publishers Weekly saying it was "a triumph of an imagination at once poetic and practical."[18] The trilogy is described by The New York Times as "a fierce meditation on the horrors of war and its psychological aftermath."[19] Novelist Jonathan Coe describes it as "one of the few real masterpieces of late 20th century British fiction."[2] British author and critic, Rosemary Dinnage reviewing in The New York Review of Books declared that it has "earned her a well-deserved place in literature"[14] resulting in its re-issue for the centenary of the First World War. In 1995 the final book in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, won the Booker–McConnell Prize.[20]
Critical appraisal
Barker's work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken.[21][2]
In 2012, The Observer named the Regeneration Trilogy as one of "The 10 best historical novels".[22]
Awards and recognition
In 1983, Barker won the Fawcett Society prize for fiction for Union Street. In 1993 she won the Guardian Fiction Prize for the Eye in the Door, and in 1995 she won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road. In May 1997, Barker was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University.[23] In 2000, she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[2]
In the review of her novel Toby's Room, The Guardian stated about her writing, "You don't go to her for fine language, you go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world".[24]
The Independent wrote of her, "she is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature".[25]
In 2019, Barker was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction for The Silence of the Girls.[26] In their review of the novel, The Times wrote, "Chilling, powerful, audacious . . . A searing twist on The Iliad. Amid the recent slew of rewritings of the great Greek myths and classics, Barker's stands out for its forcefulness of purpose and earthy compassion".[27] The Guardian stated, "This is an important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies."[28]
In July 2024, Barker was elected as an honorary Fellow of the British Academy.[21]
Personal life
In 1969, she was introduced, in a pub, to David Barker, a zoology professor and neurologist 20 years her senior, who left his marriage to live with her. They had two children together, and were married in 1978, after his divorce. Their daughter Anna Barker Ralph is a novelist. Barker was widowed when her husband died in January 2009.[29]
List of works
Union Street (1982)
Blow Your House Down (1984)
The Century's Daughter (also known as Liza's England; 1986)
The Man Who Wasn't There (1988)
Regeneration Trilogy:
Regeneration (1991)
The Eye in the Door (1993)
The Ghost Road (1995)
Another World (1998)
Border Crossing (2001)
Double Vision (2003)
Life Class (2007)
Toby's Room (2012)
Noonday (2015)
Trojan Wars series:
The Silence of the Girls (2018)
The Women of Troy (2021)
The Voyage Home (2024)
Pat Barker: To Be a Writer You Must Resist the Urge to Clean
The Author of The Silence of the Girls on the Books in Her Life
By Pat Barker
September 5, 2018
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is now available.
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What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Keep your bum glued to the chair. It’s extraordinary how, if a piece of writing is going badly—and sometimes even when it’s going well—other activities become steadily more attractive. Not just getting up to make endless cups of coffee either—even cleaning out the cupboard under the sink seems suddenly a fun thing to do. Resist! You’ve got to turn up, on time, at the blank page or screen, and then just stay there. That way, if the Muse does decide to pay you a visit, at least she’ll know where to find you.
What was the first book you fell in love with?
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery: This is the middle volume of a trilogy about a young orphan, Emily Starr, who is sent to say with her Great Aunt Elizabeth. Emily wants to be a writer. I discovered her at the age of 11 or 12 when I’d decided I wanted to write and I fell in love with the book because it made writing as a career seem possible. We can only really imagine ourselves doing what we have seen people like us do, so Emily Starr and her struggles became enormously important to me.
Is there a book you wish you had written?
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Sometimes—rarely—it happens that a character cuts the umbilical cord that binds it to its creator and wanders out into the world alone. Frankenstein, the brilliant, obsessed scientist creating a force that turns on him and destroys everything he loves has now appeared in countless other books, films and plays always symbolizing the deep unease we feel about the extent of our own power. How did a 19-year-old girl grieving for the loss of her baby manage to achieve that?
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How do you tackle writer’s block?
I don’t believe in using the term. Everybody in any line of work has bad days when nothing goes right and they are expected to work through them, I don’t see why it should be different for writers. If the words keep drying up on a particular project it may be the wrong project for you or perhaps you’re trying to write it before it’s ready to be written. Take a break, do something else, let it settle in your mind—then try again.
Which book do you return to again and again?
The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists edited by Irene and Alan Taylor
I love the diary form. I love the way each individual incident is lovingly brought to life for its own sake with no need to place it in an overarching narrative, except of course the rambling disorganized story of the diarist’s own life. There are famous names in here—Woolf, Pepys, Dorothy Wordsworth—but many others are totally unknown. Five or six entries from different diaries occur under ever date, so that the diarists’ voices seem to mingle across the centuries. A remarkable book.
Pat Barker on The Women of Troy: ‘I don’t want to get labelled as someone who writes trilogies’
Pat Barker talks about the liberation that comes with writing about myths, giving ancient women a voice and taking risks
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Author Pat Barker has just released new novel The Women of Troy (Photo: Justine Stoddard)
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Susie Mesure
August 27, 2021 6:00 am
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Pat Barker writes to fill silences. She wrote The Regeneration Trilogy, her series of First World War novels which won her the 1995 Booker Prize, to fill the silence of her step-grandfather never talking about a conflict that left him with a bayonet wound in his leg. More recently, 2018’s The Silence of the Girls gave the women in Homer’s Iliad a voice.
“Writers need absences. Everybody bounces up to you and says, ‘I’ve got a story for your next novel.’ One person did it to me yesterday,” Barker says. “But you don’t need stories. You need question marks, absences, silences that you have to fill.”
Barker, 78, felt that her characters in The Silence of the Girls – the Trojan women enslaved after the Greek conquest of Lyrnessus – had more to say, so she kept writing.
The Women of Troy is the second in a “sequence” of books exploring the ancient world’s parallels with the modern day. A third is under way, but don’t call her feminist retelling of the famous myth a trilogy. “I don’t want to get labelled as someone who writes trilogies,” she says. “It doesn’t follow on in the way the third volume of a trilogy would normally do.”
As the spoils of war, the women of Troy have been brutalised: raped, widowed, impregnated and forced to become concubines. They are no longer girls. Besides, adds Barker: “The word ‘girls’ caused quite a spot of bother, especially in America. I was made aware that ‘girls’ was a very problematical thing to have in the title. Words are so loaded, and gender words in particular are incredibly loaded.”
She admits it is “very dismissive to call a woman a girl” but points out that some of the characters in her story were just 15 years old, adding: “Women do call themselves ‘girl’ in certain contexts. And [The Silence of the Girls] is very much a book focused on the solidarity between the women.”
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Michael Rosen on life after Covid: ‘You realise, blimey, I’ve had my life saved’
Although The Silence of the Girls made the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, Barker thought it was a “complete failure” when she sent it to her editor. “I’d had this wonderful idea, which was quite ambitious in scale and difficult in execution, and I just thought I hadn’t pulled it off at all.”
Barker’s are the latest in a slew of feminist reimaginings of Greek myths, from Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad to Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships. She was spurred to write them after reading a passage by Philip Roth about how the dawn of European literature begins with two powerful men quarrelling over a young girl in The Iliad. “The girls they are quarrelling over say absolutely nothing. I think women hear that silence and I’m not sure men do.”
Book, The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker
In the book, her 15th novel, Barker keeps the same heroine, Breseis, the 19-year-old enslaved Trojan queen who was given to Achilles as a victory prize. When we meet her again, Achilles is dead, Breseis pregnant with his child and married, at his behest, to his associate, Alcimus. Breseis recalls being dragged from Achilles’ bed for the nuptials with “a semen-stained sheet wrapped round my shoulders, breadcrumbs in my hair, feeling sick, smelling of sex”.
It was “immensely liberating” to write about myths rather than historical facts, Barker says. “With a myth, I can have Achilles’ men singing English rugby songs and it’s good that they are because it underlines the continuity in attitudes to women then and now.”
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Elif Shafak on The Island of Missing Trees: ‘If I worry about how my books will be received, I can’t write’
Barker was born to a single mother in North Yorkshire in 1943 and brought up by her grandparents after her mother remarried; she never knew her father. She was a teacher before having her two children. Her first book, Union Street, which focused on working-class women in North East England, was published when she was 40 after three previous manuscripts hadn’t got anywhere.
Her breakthrough came after a creative writing course, where she met Angela Carter. “She read and she commented and she encouraged me,” says Barker.
When she has finished retelling Greek myths, Barker intends to keep writing, if only for herself. “I always remember how Union Street gelled at the point I said to myself, ‘Which book would you write if you absolutely knew you would never be published?’ That is the project. That’s the one you should go for.”
I can’t be alone in hoping that I get to read it.
What I’m reading now…
Coffin, Scarcely Used by Colin Watson
“Fiction, for me, is work but crime fiction is escapism. This is the first in an old series set in a place called Flaxborough. I remember the TV version.”
What I’m reading next…
Our Wild Calling by Richard Louv
“It’s about the relationship between humans and animals. I’m interested in humans connecting with animals in a way that’s transformative.”
The Women of Troy is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99
Pat Barker on The Iliad: Men do not hear women’s silences
In The Silence of the Girls, Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker gives voice to the voiceless characters of The Iliad
16 August 2018
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Book cover of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
We know the men – Agamemnon, Odysseus, Patroclus, Hector, Paris... the list continues. On the first page of Barker’s fourteenth novel, a Trojan queen named Briseis hears the war cry of the most famous and brutal of them all: Achilles.
After her city is ransacked by the Greeks, Briseis is captured, transformed in a moment from queen to slave, awarded to Achilles and left to mourn her dead family.
"‘Great Achilles’," Barker writes in the novel’s opening lines. "'Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him 'the butcher'."
The men of The Iliad have no problem with expressing themselves, often in lengthy battleground speeches. Barker is interested in other conversations and stories left untold. What words did the women speak when alone with each other: in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead?
One afternoon not so long ago, Five Dials took the train from King’s Cross to Durham to speak to Pat about the book. It was a sunny and optimistic day, but the conversation inevitably made its way towards the subject Barker has examined with precision and care over the course of her career: the lasting damage of warfare. Her Regeneration trilogy examined the legacy of stress, trauma, dislocation and anger carried by a generation of First World War veterans.
From the twentieth century, our conversation eventually worked its way back towards the Greeks and the Trojans. But first it was important to clarify a tale about the beginning of Barker's career.
I hear your husband plucked your debut novel, Union Street, from out of the bin.
He was very, very supportive.
Did he actually fish through?
Yes. I threw it into the bin. Under the potato peelings, too.
And there wasn’t another version on a computer?
I wasn’t writing on a computer, no.
So that could’ve been the end of the book.
It was that close. That was a very big moment. It would be a trifling gesture now but it wasn’t in those days. He knew I was feeling very downbeat about it. But I always feel downbeat about my books. I’ve a great suspicion of writers who wake up in the middle of the night and admire their own genius. I just think: fraud.
You wrote three novels before Union Street. All went unpublished?
That’s right. It was difficult but I always made it an absolute rule that if I got a negative phone call, or somebody sent a rejection note, I would just go on and finish the sentence I was writing. I might sort of howl after that, but only after that sentence had been finished. You’ve got to be like that.
Mercenary?
It’s actually a pretty tough career.
Maybe after one rejected book a person would go on to the second. But after the second gets rejected, to go on to a third?
I was getting more and more bloody-minded all the time. By the time I was writing the third I was very much writing what I wanted to write without any kind of references to the publishing industry at all. That’s not a bad attitude.
What was the first unpublished novel like?
It was a slender, sensitive, middle-class lady’s book and that’s not who I am. It was writing that was admired at the time. And I thought: no.
How much dialogue was in the first couple of novels before Union Street?
Probably less. The percentage of dialogue went up as I started to find my own voice.
With Union Street, you’re plunged into a world alive with voices.
And they’re still alive. Not the specific characters, but women like that are still very much there. There’s this agonizing: could you possibly write working-class characters when you yourself are no longer working class? It misunderstands the nature of writing. You’re writing from a very deep place in your personality and possibly out of the sort of archetypes that were formed in your relationship with your family and people who had impact on you very closely.
Men don't hear women's silences. They just complain about them yammering on.
I read your first book right after I read your most recent. I felt a tether between...
You’ve a tidy mind, haven’t you?
I grabbed it off the shelf. Thankfully they were all lined up. I could go straight to the beginning. It felt like there was a line connecting the women in Union Street to the Trojan women. When did your interest in the Greeks begin?
Much later. I would’ve said about five years ago. Actually, somebody pointed out that there’s a passage in Life Class where Elinor Brooke is describing the Café Royale and the way the atmosphere had changed in the first days of the First World War. She says the old men were all panicking because they thought their day was over and the young men were spouting things they had read in the newspapers. And the women had gone absolutely silent. She said it was like the beginning of The Iliad. When Agamemnon and Achilles are making these fantastic speeches and the girls they are talking about say nothing at all.
Behind those great figures are other voices...
That are not being heard, yes.
When did you find your way to these voices?
I had just read The Iliad and was astonished by that silence. The eloquence of the men, the absolute silence of the women they’re quarrelling about.
It’s interesting. Obviously by chance one of my neighbours two or three doors up the street happens to be an expert on Homer. I had no idea she was there. We met for a drink when she was told what I was doing. She’s a classicist. She said she was reading the original Greek at the age of fourteen. She was sitting in class, a little fourteen-year-old girl, absolutely outraged by this silence. To her it was just leaping off the page. I’m sure a perfectly nice fourteen-year-old boy would read the same scene and wouldn’t notice the silence. Men don’t hear women’s silences. They just complain about them yammering on.
Heroes – from the heroic Greek figures to the superheroes in films today – take up a lot of space. It’s difficult to peer around them sometimes.
Yes. Agamemnon is definitely manspreading and mansplaining to the nth degree.
Why did you choose Briseis as the narrator?
I wanted it to be about her, because, apart from anything else, the descent from being a queen to being a slave is so dramatic.
Perhaps it would’ve been nice to have another character who had been a slave in her previous life, but then there’s a little bit of that in Uza, who didn’t care whose dick was up her as long as she was living a comfortable life.
The range of femininity in the book is wide.
And those women talking together are very much like the ones in Union Street. It’s the same kind of conversation between women.
Nothing happens in the book, or in The Iliad, that isn't happening in the contemporary world - give or take changes in weaponry
The language between the characters is just modern enough. Or perhaps just universal enough. Were you looking for that effect?
Those men can’t possibly have spoken in fifteen-page speeches. They would not have sat through each other’s speeches without interrupting after the first ten or eleven words.
The speeches on the battlefield are amazing. Because you can’t actually kill the bloke until you’ve established who his great-grandfather was. They give each other complete genealogies. There are two men who meet on the battlefield and discover that their grandfathers were guest friends, which is a very important relationship. They’d stayed with each other and automatically could no longer kill one another. Because Granddad and Granddad knew each other well. So, they avoid each other on the battlefield.
The first chapter rings with a modern sense too. I couldn’t help but think of Syria. The attack on a sun-baked city full of narrow lanes is about to begin. The sense of impending doom would be just like it is today. Is there a continuity that runs through all the novels you’ve written about conflict?
Nothing happens in the book that is not happening in the contemporary world. Nothing happens in The Iliad that isn’t happening in the contemporary world, give or take changes in weaponry, which doesn’t make it worse. It just makes it different.
When we, say, look at what’s happening in the present, the danger is that people tend to think: what’s happening in the present ‘out there’.
There are the women in the ISIS slave markets. But there are young women who are illegal immigrants in this country, working for no money. They’re working for food, and if they are sexually assaulted, which they very commonly are, they cannot go to the police. They can’t complain to anybody. In effect, these women are slaves. They’re being sexually abused. And that is in our society, not in others.
You don’t have to scrape away layers to find what’s relevant.
It’s right here, yes.
In terms of primary documents...
Well, there’s only one I’m looking at.
But in your career as a novelist you’ve conducted extensive research, whether it’s the primary documentation of war, or the poems written after. Does this material make your job easier?
Writing myth is much more freeing than writing history. You should not ideally have any anachronisms at all in history. Not the way I do it, anyway. People differ, people are prepared to bend history to various degrees, but I don’t. If Rivers and Sassoon [both historical figures feature in Barker’s Regeneration trilogy] are having lunch in the Conservative Club on Princes Street, that’s what they were doing. And Rivers chooses the boiled fish because he has ulcers. Did Rivers have ulcers? Yes, he did. It’s like that. Which is also stimulating. It’s writing in a straitjacket, but that would stimulate your imagination.
The freedom of myth, the freedom to be naughty and deliberately anachronistic is also very stimulating and a relief after the other. After so many years of writing in a different way.
After so many years of adhering to this sense of history, has writing myth become a freeing, joyous writing experience?
Oh, God, no. I was in agony over that book many, many times.
Did you feel freedom with your treatment of Achilles?
There is an alternative to the myth that he’s shot in the back by an arrow. A poisoned arrow, possibly. Fired by Paris. A coward’s weapon in a coward‘s hands.
Achilles is amphibious. That’s what makes him interesting to me. If he were just a sort of copper-bottomed Bronze Age hero I wouldn’t be particularly interested. It‘s that ambivalence, actually a femininity, the fluidity of which underlies it all, which makes it interesting. I actually think he’s a fascinating character.
Is this the first time that you’ve looked at what could be called Stockholm Syndrome? This idea of a complicated love that arises?
A very young girl, like Tecmessa when she was first bought, would suffer from Stockholm Syndrome because everything has been swept away. And there’s this bloke who‘s done it all. Nevertheless you cling to him. You convince yourself you’re in love with him; perhaps in a way you are.
Patroclus’s captive falling in love with him is a bit more comprehensible. I read something that said Patroclus in The Iliad is simply a plot device, but I don’t think he’s a plot device at all. I think he’s the ethical centre of the story. He‘s the only halfway decent guy in the whole bloody thing, and I think Homer represents him as that.
What I come away with all the time is an awe of Homer’s mind. Amazing, amazing writer, well not writer because he didn’t write, of course, but you know what I mean.
And, you know, I’ll probably get myself into all kinds of trouble with classicists because everybody is saying it was an endless number of people. And I think it wasn’t. One man wrote Achilles’s speeches. I’d go to the stake for that.
Five Dials is a literary magazine featuring brilliant fiction, poetry, literary criticism, current-ish events and illustration. Great minds gathered in PDF form. The full version of this interview will appear in Five Dials 46. Subscribe for free
Archives: A Q&A with Pat Barker
From the Women’s Prize Archives.
Pat Barker’s wonderful historical retelling The Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. We caught up with Pat to discuss the Iliad, re-writing myths and giving voices to overlooked women.
Why was it important to tell the story of the Iliad from a female perspective?
The Iliad begins with long and immensely eloquent speeches from two of its main characters, Achilles and Agamemnon who are quarrelling over ownership pf a slave girl. The girl says nothing. Philip Roth once wrote the whole of European literature begins with two men fighting over the body of a young girl. I thought: Yes, if you’re a man it does. If you’re a woman it begins with silence. So my main motivation was to give a voice to those silenced women.
Why did you choose Briseis as the main character?
Briseis begins the day as a queen and ends it as a slave girl in bed with the man who killed her husband and her brothers. It’s impossible to imagine a more dramatic change of circumstances than that. I was interested in how such a person could survive, let alone recover.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
The Silence of the Girls
by Pat Barker
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How does writing myth compare with writing history?
In writing history the one thing to avoid at all costs is anachronism. In writing myth anachronisms are almost essential. They’re a way of reminding the reader – and yourself – that the truths of myth are still applicable today. History is then. Myth is now.
Why has there been a recent surge in the retelling of classical myths?
I don’t think anybody knows, but one of the reasons may be that we are deluged with over-hyped stories in various media – including fake news – and these stories occupy the headlines for a short time and then disappear. By contrast, myths have been around for thousands of years and yet they are still relevant.
Can you say which women writers you particular admire?
I admire any writer, published or unpublished, who shows up at the cliff face day after day, no matter what else is going on in her life. Writers like that have my total respect, because I know from first-hand experience how difficult it can be.
What are you working on now?
Good advice: never talk about work in progress. If you want a cup of tea, you need to keep the steam in the kettle.
Pat Barker: ‘I’m at the stage where there’s a what-the-hell feeling’
The 81-year-old Booker winner talks about The Voyage Home, the third part of her bestselling Trojan War series, and wrestling with mortality
a woman in a blue jacket stands in front of a red background
The author Pat Barker: “I don’t think writers suffer as much as perhaps they ought to”
GARY CALTON/EYEVINE
Johanna Thomas-Corr
Saturday August 17 2024, 12.00am BST, The Times
The closer Pat Barker comes to death, the lighter she feels. “Whenever I’ve been ill enough for death to be a real possibility, I haven’t minded in the least,” the Booker prizewinning author, 81, tells me from the well-upholstered living room of her new house in Lanchester, Co Durham. “There is a freedom in a recognition of your own death and in a curious kind of way it’s hopeful.”
Barker is not talking in abstractions. She really did come within touching distance of death 18 months ago, when a routine operation to insert a pacemaker went wrong and she ended up in emergency surgery to staunch the bleeding in her leg. Her main worry, as she lay in her hospital bed, was that she didn’t want to leave an “orphan” book behind. She was midway through The Voyage Home, the third part of her bestselling Trojan War series, and left strict instructions to her daughter, Anna, not to publish it if it was unfinished. As for all other aspects of her earthly mortality? “If anything, there’s a slight feeling of ‘Bring it on!’”
This lightening of tone is evident in Barker’s disposition and her writing. Although physically she is more confined as a result of problems with her feet and joints, in conversation she is lively and quick to laugh. And she did manage to finish The Voyage Home, her 16th novel, which continues her brilliant, subversive reimagining of Homer’s Iliad. It focuses on Cassandra, the royal prophetess of doom, and it is both extremely gory and surprisingly funny, with plenty of gruff wit. “There’s a sort of what-the-hell feeling, I think, which comes from being at the stage of my career that I’m at,” she says. “I think the comedy in my writing was squeezed out for a time but it was there in the beginning. Cassandra becomes immensely lighter in mood the closer she gets to death.”
The Voyage Home is Barker’s 16th novel and focuses on Cassandra, the royal prophetess of doom
The Voyage Home is Barker’s 16th novel and focuses on Cassandra, the royal prophetess of doom
Cassandra is, of course, the kidnapped Trojan princess whose dire warnings of disaster are ignored by the men around her. Many women, I’m sure, can relate. She is forced to become concubine to the Greek king, Agamemnon (a “bloodsucking bastard”), and foresees both of their bloody ends. “Two dead bodies in a courtyard,” Cassandra informs her slave, Ritsa, with a resigned laugh. “Agamemnon and me. Both with stab wounds.”
As intriguing as Cassandra’s situation is, Barker found her challenging to write. “She’s kissed by Apollo and has the gift of prophecy. Then he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed. That’s a fascinating predicament. But a figure imprisoned in a prophecy, muttering about being kissed by a god, also makes for a very static character.” That is why The Voyage Home is narrated mostly through the eyes of the fictional slave Ritsa, another beleaguered chattel of war. Although she resents serving a mistress who is “mad as a box of snakes”, Ritsa discovers a tenderness for Cassandra as they sail with the Greek army back to Mycenae — where Agamemnon’s vengeful wife, Clytemnestra, is waiting for them.
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It’s a tense third instalment to follow The Silence of the Girls (2018) — the film version is being cast by Joe Wright, the director of Atonement — and The Women of Troy (2021), both told from the perspective of the enslaved women in the Greeks’ “rape camp”. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, the first book hit a raw nerve and the second became a Sunday Times No 1 bestseller. Barker had dared to tell a different, unblinkered version of our foundational myth, one in which the venerated Greek heroes are depicted as bellicose louts, looting houses and gang-raping women as part of their macho spectacle.
Anna Caterina Antonacci as Cassandra in the opera Les Troyens
Anna Caterina Antonacci as Cassandra in the opera Les Troyens
ALASTAIR MUIR/SHUTTERSTOCK
Barker says she was shocked, going back to The Iliad in the early 1990s, that the women the men were fighting over were entirely voiceless in Homer’s text. “That silence of the girls is so striking. I don’t know if men hear that silence but women hear that silence.”
Troubling silences have echoed throughout Barker’s life and work. Born in Thornaby-on-Tees, North Yorkshire, she was brought up by her working-class grandmother and step-grandfather after her mother gave birth to her out of wedlock. She was told that her father died in the Second World War, although as Barker has said in earlier interviews: “I don’t think anybody can be sure what happened because nobody knew who he was.”
• The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker review
It’s a mystery that has come to haunt much of her work. She points out that Kelly Brown, the protagonist of her first novel, Union Street (1982), is one of many fatherless characters in her work and one of many who experience sexual violence. “So it starts with that.”
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There’s another mystery that shaped her work — a “hideous wound” on her step-grandfather’s torso. Having spied it each time he washed himself at the kitchen sink, she later learnt it was from a bayonet attack in the First World War. He never spoke about it. “There was the wound and there was silence,” she has said, “so there was a mystery, and that is what usually sets a novelist going.”
Barker has written many accomplished novels but it’s the books about war that define her career, particularly the Regeneration trilogy, written in the 1990s, about the psychological impact of the First World War. If you think about Barker’s fiction, memory immediately alights on images of splintered bones, ruptured flesh and blown-out eyeballs.
Barker won the Man Booker Prize in 1995 for her novel The Ghost Road
Barker won the Man Booker Prize in 1995 for her novel The Ghost Road
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What’s different about The Voyage Home is that Barker turns her gaze to children affected by war: the Trojan babies hurled from the battlements, the children cooked and served to their father for dinner and, most memorably, King Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, who was sacrificed so that his ships might have a fair wind. Dead children reappear as ghosts who sing nursery rhymes and leave wet footprints in the king’s palace. Despite being an “incurable rationalist”, Barker insists this novel needed these spirits baying for blood. “If Agamemnon’s palace wasn’t haunted, it bloody well ought to have been.”
I tell her the novel resonates strongly with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, during which schools and children’s hospitals have been targeted. She agrees, pointing out that in most wars the women and children “suffer disproportionately”. The First World War was an anomaly in that frontline troops faced more hardship than anyone else.
But she is wary about drawing too many modern parallels in her writing. “People know what they think about the things that are going on in the world so you run the risk of activating people’s prejudices,” she says. In historical writing and writing from myth, however, “you go under their radar. Readers don’t always know what they think, so you get a more open and honest response.”
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Still, she insists “these stories are relevant today”. This is why she incorporates anachronisms into the books, such as the Greeks singing sexually violent rugby songs or Achilles saying things like: “Hey up, lass.” Such anachronisms are forbidden in historical fiction but “absolutely essential” in the retelling of the myths, Barker says. “You’ve got to keep saying, ‘History is then, myth is now.’”
• No Rooney or Tóibín — this year’s Booker prize longlist is all about the Americans
Barker’s fascination with war has been a constant. “If imaginations had colours, hers, you feel, would be khaki,” the Sunday Times critic, Peter Kemp, once said of her. What has changed, she feels, is the immediacy of war. We can see it 24 hours a day on our screens. She admits that she wouldn’t mind giving herself “a little holiday from the sheer toxicity of it all”. Does it not take its toll on her? She laughs bitterly. “I don’t think writers suffer as much as perhaps they ought to. The craftsmanship protects you. You’re creating a space for characters to live in and that’s so all-absorbing that it’s a kind of insulation from the horrors you’re depicting.”
Barker has a special talent for stripping away the beauty of an image to reveal ugliness and threat. In Regeneration (1991) lime blossoms evoke suffocating memories of gas attacks. In her latest, beautiful flowers rot and the sea is the colour of phlegm. She describes the king’s “saggy, thick-veined scrotum” and Cassandra’s semen-smeared thigh after he’s raped her. “She could chop his dick off if she wanted to,” Clytemnestra later thinks, when Agamemnon appears naked before her. “There’s nobody to stop her. Stuff it in his mouth.” This was, apparently, a common form of battlefield mutilation at Troy.
Jonny Lee Miller and Tanya Allen in Regeneration, the film adaptation of Pat Barker’s 1991 novel of the same name
Jonny Lee Miller and Tanya Allen in Regeneration, the film adaptation of Pat Barker’s 1991 novel of the same name
ALAMY
As for the book’s sex scenes, most of which are rape, Barker says: “I’ve always thought that the secret to writing about sex is to write about it exactly like everything else. It’s not a sacrament … just part of human life.”
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Is she an unromantic person? “Romance is great but if you’re still married 40 years later, it’s not because of the romance. It’s all kinds of other things, including sex. Including very, very good sex.” Forty years just so happens to be the length of time she was with her husband, David, a zoology professor, who died in 2009.
She doesn’t rule out the possibility of writing about late-in-life love. In the meantime, Barker reveals she is in the “unusual position, for me” of having several projects on the go. One is a contemporary novel, which she hasn’t attempted since Double Vision (2003), about a man in his sixties suffering from a “complete loss of identity” during the coronavirus lockdown. “It’s a great trauma like the First World War,” she says of the pandemic experience.
The second is another novel in the Trojan women series, picking up the story of Briseis’s unwanted pregnancy. There’s also the film of The Silence of the Girls. Barker already has experience of Hollywood adaptations in Stanley & Iris (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda, which was very loosely based on Union Street. “It brought me my own experiences of the tabloid press. I had somebody parked outside my door who wanted me to say it was utterly wrong of Jane Fonda to have a boob job. It was so grotesque, it wasn’t possible to be angry. I thought it was very funny.”
Might this be one of the memories she intends to include in the non-fiction book she has also just started, I wonder? “It’s a sort of memoir,” she says tentatively. She doesn’t sound like a woman who is ready to meet her maker just yet.
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker is out on Aug 22 (Hamish Hamilton £20 pp304). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Interview
Pat Barker and Benjamin Myers in conversation: ‘I’m absolutely intolerable when I’m not writing’
This article is more than 6 months old
Killian Fox
Ahead of new books by both, the two English novelists discuss their friendship, the baggage that comes with being labelled ‘northern writers’ and why the Krankies’ memoir is a must-read
Killian Fox
Sat 27 Jul 2024 13.00 EDT
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Benjamin Myers first came across the Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker when he was seven or eight and, though he didn’t read her till much later, she made an impression, even then. “I was on holiday with my parents and found a copy of Union Street, Pat’s first novel,” he recalls. “I asked my mum about it and she said: ‘Oh, not only is that set round our way but the author is from Yorkshire.’ I was so struck by that. It’s partly what made me want to be a writer.”
A decade ago the two became acquainted, brought together by an old friend of Myers who was seeing Barker’s daughter. By then, Myers was establishing himself as one of the most electrifying voices in British fiction, setting most of his work, such as the 2013 Gordon Burn prize-winning novel Pig Iron, in his native north-east. Barker, who has published 15 books over a stellar 40-year career, including the Regeneration trilogy and more recently a series of novels reimagining the Iliad from a female perspective, continues to be an inspiration for him.
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Ahead of the publication of his new novel, Rare Singles, a meditation on grief, love and the redemptive power of music, and Barker’s return to ancient Greece in The Voyage Home, the two friends met up over Zoom to discuss what it means to be “northern writers”, the perils of inhabiting characters of a different race or gender, and the authors and books they love.
Have you ever felt the need to resist the “northern writer” label [Myers lives in Hebden Bridge, Barker in Durham]?
Pat Barker Being a northern writer, even now – or perhaps especially now – requires a kind of courage or bloody-mindedness, because we are so deeply unfashionable. I remember Hilary Mantel saying that because she had a northern accent, she just had to accept that everybody who listened to her thought she was a bit thick. I think that prejudice still exists. And there’s you [Ben] – male, pale, northern – how do you even get into print? Apart from your gigantic talent, of course.
Benjamin Myers It’s weird, because being a fortysomething white male, it’s a position of privilege …
PB Not in the literary world, it’s not.
BM No. And as soon as you open your mouth and say you’re from a comprehensive school in the north-east of England… Last year, I was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Recently I was talking to another writer who’s female and Asian and she said: “Oh, you know we were brought in to up the diversity quota.” And I was like: “Me, why?” And she said: “Well, you’re from the north of England.” I was quite flabbergasted and embarrassed to hear that.
So you react against it?
PB Oh, I think I violently reacted against it at one point. I began by writing “middle-class lady novelist” novels. They weren’t published, they didn’t deserve to be. I said to myself: “Look, you are a northern, working-class, female bastard, get on and write about it.”
In Rare Singles, Ben, you write about Yorkshire through the eyes of a complete outsider. Did that give you a fresh perspective?
BM I think so yeah. It’s a novel about an old American guy who comes to perform at a northern soul weekender in Scarborough. I just thought, post-Brexit, we in England have been taking a long, hard look at ourselves – or some of us have been.
PB Not anybody in power, I’m afraid.
BM No. But I thought I need some fresh eyes on the north of England. I went to Scarborough on a few occasions and thought: pretend you’ve never been here, or to England. Look at what people are eating, how they dress, how they’re talking. But the big difference is the character is of a different race to me, he’s black …
PB You are actually a very brave writer, and that’s what I admire about you.
I was going to ask about writing so far outside your experience. It’s probably quite an anxiety-inducing thing to do.
PB It’s a terribly brave thing to do. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
BM Well, there were advanced discussions about it. Someone suggested it wouldn’t get published.
PB And the other character is a woman; even that is problematical these days.
BM But one of the main criticisms that I’ve had for my writing is that I write about men.
PB Brilliantly. They need writing about for goodness sake, who’s the problem in all this?
I just feel really lucky to have a career in writing at all. And I know it can end at any point. I think all writers live in fear of the rug being pulled
Benjamin Myers
BM Yeah. So [the main characters are] a black man and a woman, neither of which I am. But without being too reductive, people are people and we generally, for the most part, have the same fears and desires and needs. Rare Singles is a book about grief and trauma, and that goes beyond age, wealth, race, nationality… For the first time, one of my novels has been through a sensitivity reader.
PB How was it?
BM It was fine. Some comments came back that I didn’t necessarily agree with.
Such as?
BM It was suggested that I mention skin colour more, and I don’t mention skin colour at all in the book, because it’s not about skin colour, it’s about lived experience, grief, connection. And readers aren’t stupid. They know who they’re reading about and what they’re experiencing.
Pat, would you agree to a sensitivity read?
PB I would have to, and I may have to, because I got very sick recently of writing about bronze age women. I want to write a modern novel with a male protagonist about the divisiveness in our society, set in the recent past in England. We are in a honeymoon period at the moment when it looks as if the divisions will be less prominent, but I do think that a year on from the election, people’s teeth will be at each other’s throats with even more enthusiasm.
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Pat, you said in the past that you weren’t temperamentally equipped to being a writer, whereas Ben, you seem to love the process.
PB I sometimes love the process, and I’m absolutely intolerable when I’m not writing. So from everybody else’s point of view, it’s quite clear I have to do it.
BM It’s the same for me. I would say that writing is the only time that I’m not anxious about the world, because I’m in control of it. But the downside is, it’s compulsive for me. Sometimes an idea comes that is so strong and difficult to ignore that everything in my life gets put on hold while I do it.
PB What happens when you stop?
BM Complete mental and physical exhaustion. Last month, I decided I would have June off because I was so tired, but then I wrote 25,000 words of a novella.
I began by writing “middle-class lady novelist” novels. They weren’t published, they didn’t deserve to be
Pat Barker
PB You just cheat and start again so you don’t have to face up to being you without the writing!
BM Yeah, writing is a perpetual attempt to avoid the real world. I don’t fully live in the real world.
PB You should talk to [Barker’s daughter] Anna about this. She’s just been trying to sort out my financial affairs, which have got into a muddle simply because I don’t open things. I think they’ll go away if I ignore them, but it really doesn’t work like that.
What books have you enjoyed recently?
BM The new Kevin Barry novel, The Heart in Winter, is brilliant. It’s more about the language than the plot with him, but every line made me feel like giving up writing.
PB Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I was just blown away by it.
BM Irish fiction is the stuff that’s given me some of the most excitement – Kevin Barry, Sebastian Barry, Colin Barrett, Rob Doyle. On a different note, the comedy duo the Krankies wrote a very good book that is really vulgar and bawdy and a brilliant insight into the world of light entertainment and the club scene of the 70s and 80s. That wasn’t the book I was intending to mention, but it did give me a lot of pleasure.
Pat, tell me about The Voyage Home. You say you’ve reached the end of your time writing about bronze age women?
PB I think there is another book there but I’m not sure I want it to be the next book. The Voyage Home is about revenge – the necessity of revenge, the pointlessness of it. It wasn’t an easy book to write, but that was largely for personal reasons – things like the pandemic and moving house and being ill. It changes your attitude to a book if you’ve had to really battle your way through it, and this one was forged in a furnace.
BM Pat, what would you be doing if you hadn’t got published – if Union Street had never been pulled out of the bin and passed on to Virago?
PB I’d still be writing, I think, because it does seem essential for my equilibrium. Otherwise, I might have become a therapist. It’s the same focus on language, and listening carefully, and trouble, and that’s the kind of novel I write. But I’m glad my husband fished Union Street out of the bin, and that Virago thought it was worth publishing. It’s not a bad career. One of the benefits of being a writer, of course, is that you could go on until you fall off your perch. There’s no retirement at 65.
BM I just feel really lucky to have a career in writing at all. And I know it can end at any point. I think all writers live in fear of the rug being pulled. The possibility of having to enter the workplace now is unthinkable to me, because I’m not even fully socialised. I’m the opposite of institutionalised, whatever that is.
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20) on 22 August. To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Noonday
by Pat Barker
Hamish Hamilton, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 259, ISBN 9780241146064
Spectator Bookshop, 15.99 [pounds sterling]
If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang ('rug-rethink', 'going tonto' etc) then the later Pat Barker can be similarly identified by its finely wrought accounts of physical trauma. 'Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered,' runs a specimen sentence from the new novel, 'galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire.'
Noonday's Blitz-era setting--the horses are in flight from a bombed-out brewery--gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best: intent descriptions of splayed limbs that are sometimes engaged in the act of love, occasionally the subjects of paintings or, more often, casualties of war. Concluding the trilogy that began with Life Class (2007), it finds its three remaining protagonists--the artists Elinor and Paul and their old friend Kit Neville--in nervy middle-age, driving ambulances and bearing stretchers in a part of central London where the death toll is at its heaviest.
While the ghosts of previous instalments continue to gibber and fret (Elinor, in particular, is fixated on her at one point incestuous relationship with her dead brother Toby), the motto here, in a world where the prospect of extinction lies around every corner, is carpe diem. Nothing else, surely, can explain Paul's fling with the obliging Sandra, prior to her departure into the Wrens, or Elinor's passade with Neville, in which yet more bygone spectres are briefly re-animated.
All this leaves the novel delicately poised, halfway between an endlessly reconstituted past and a shrapnel-strewn present where tragedy and banality go hand in hand. 'My daughter's that age,' Neville remarks, as the body of a six-yearold girl is brought out of a ruined house, 'the sort of remark you might make outside the school gates.' Pulling it forward, on the other hand, are two supporting characters--Kenny, the East End evacuee foisted upon Elinor's sister and presumed dead in a bombed basement, and Bertha the outsize medium who terrifies Paul by claiming to 'see' the boy standing alongside him in Russell Square.
Although Noonday ends with most of its emotional issues resolved, the plot carries a faint whiff of desultoriness. Its conspicuous merits lie in scene, incident and painterly gloss--a disrupted séance, cigarette smoke at a meeting 'settling into new patterns ... like the marbled endpapers of books'.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Taylor, D.J. "Spirits of the Blitz." Spectator, vol. 328, no. 9757, 29 Aug. 2015, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A426889069/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3835e4b9. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barker, Pat NOONDAY Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $27.95 3, 8 ISBN: 978-0-385-53772-8
After a midtrilogy slump with Toby's Room (2012), Barker returns to form in the rueful, cautiously hopeful conclusion to a story that began in pre-World War I London and concludes with its three protagonists enduring the Blitz. Ambitious young students when their complex bonds were forged at the Slade School of Fine Art in Life Class (2008), Elinor Brooke, Kit Neville, and Paul Tarrant are now middle-aged painters contending with ingrained sexism (Elinor), a declining reputation (Neville), and the knowledge that his best-known, if not necessarily his best, work is behind him (Paul). World War I brought disfiguring injuries to Kit and drew together Elinor and Paul as lovers; now all three are on the homefront, dealing with the carnage produced by German planes' near-nightly bombings. Barker searingly re-creates a wartime landscape in which the apocalyptic has become routine: people stoically huddle overnight in Tube stations and barely notice the rubble they walk past on the daytime streets; rescue workers hunt for survivors inside devastated buildings that may collapse at any moment. But this is not a rah-rah Britain's Greatest Generation novel; Barker unsentimentally depicts Kit maneuvering for advantage as Paul and Elinor's marriage falters. Her mother's death stirs unwelcome memories of Elinor's charged relationship with her brother Toby; Paul, unsettled by thoughts of his own long-dead, mentally ill mother, falls into bed with a fellow air-raid warden. "Why do men think that makes it better?" Elinor snorts when he offers the time-honored excuse that the affair wasn't important. "It makes it worse." Is her one-night stand with Kit payback or a long overdue reckoning with their past? It might be both; Barker is as subtle and tough-minded here about human nature as in all her work. Yet the closing pages suggest the possibility of new beginnings even as they acknowledge the permanence of old wounds. Lacks the epic sweep of her Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy but nonetheless, a strong example of this gifted British writer's intelligent, uncompromising way with fiction.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
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"Barker, Pat: NOONDAY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A438646802/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=478c1ea3. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Pat Barker
NOONDAY
272pp. Hamish Hamilton. 18.99 [pounds sterling].
978 0 241 14606 4
At night, in doorways, prostitutes spotlight their "exposed breasts or the triangle of darkness at the apex of their thighs" with blackout torches. It is a confusing image for Kit Neville--an artist wounded during the First World War, now a volunteer ambulance driver in London during the Second--because it reminds him of an incident he attended near Kings' Cross, where a make-shift bomb shelter under a railway arch was hit:
heavy rescue squads were pulling arms, legs, heads, hands, feet
from the rubble, lining them up on the pavement. Somebody had
flashed a torch along the line and it was exactly like this.
Revulsion and a kind of excitement.
Noonday is, as its title suggests, full of chiaroscuro; light (and life) is harsh. The year is 1940, the Blitz has started and we see Elinor Brooke--a former friend of Kit while the pair were students together at the Slade School of Fine Art--visit her sister Rachel's farmhouse in the countryside (the windows "wide open in the heat as if ... gasping for breath"), where everyone is subsumed in waiting--for their sick mother to die upstairs, for a bomb attack to strike them down at any moment. "They were in deep shade: the shadow of a branch fell across Elinor's bare ankle so sharply it suggested amputation."
Pat Barker has fast-forwarded the lives of the three central characters--Kit, Elinor and Paul Tarrant, loosely based on the artists C. R. W. Nevinson, Dora Carrington and Paul Nash, respectively--whom we met during their late teens and early twenties in Life Class (2007) and Toby's Room (2012). After an on-off relationship in the previous two books, Elinor and Paul are married, but unable to have children. Rachel's housekeeper calls Elinor "Miss" and "Elinor knew exactly what she meant. Miss-take. Missed out. Even, perhaps, miss-carriage? No, she was being paranoid". Paul, who had volunteered as an orderly for the Belgian Red Cross in the first war, now works as an air-raid warden, while Elinor is based in the Tottenham Court Road ambulance depot with Kit, who is recently divorced (his wife and six-year-old daughter live in America).
Kenny, a child evacuee staying with Rachel, attaches himself to Paul. But Paul's attachment to Kenny is more or less a way of reconciling himself with his own dead mother. At the boy's insistence, Paul returns him to his family in the East End of London, and leaves them in a crumbling school along with hundreds of other newly homeless civilians waiting for officials to bus them out to Kent. A few days later, he reads in a newspaper report that the school has collapsed; it is then cemented over as a mass grave. There is repeated stress on Kenny playing with toy soldiers in front of Paul as well as the "never-ending pop-pop of guns.... Such an inconsequential sound: almost like a child's toy", as though, despite this being a clear (and unoriginal) connection, we can't quite have picked up on it. Barker does manage to nudge some of these stock descriptions in a different direction. At one point, instead of tidying the little figurines away, Paul places them in his pocket--a gesture of protection.
This is Barker's second trilogy of war novels; the previous one, which began with Regeneration (1991), concentrated on the period from 1917 to the Armistice, and took us, with admirable acuity, into the minds of real (Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen) and imagined (Billy Prior) shell-shocked veterans at Craiglockhart War Hospital. Like Life Class and Toby's Room, Noonday lacks the same seamless blend of history and fiction. One of the longest shadows in this new trilogy is cast by Elinor's brother, Toby, who served as a medical officer in the First World War. No one in the family, apart from Elinor, knows that he killed himself in no-man's-land to avoid a court martial for being caught having sex with a stable boy--the denouement of Toby's Room. Nor does anyone know, Elinor assumes, that Toby once committed incest with her--although her mother's dying words in Noonday ("I knew") bother her. Staring at a not-very-good portrait of Toby in uniform hanging in Rachel's hallway, Elinor thinks, "Item: one standard-issue gallant young officer, Grim Reaper for the use of. There was nothing of Toby there at all". Throughout the book, italics are well deployed to indicate a wry voice within a character's own voice. But Elinor's internal monologue continues: "Nigel Featherstone was the artist: and he was very well regarded; you saw his portraits of judges, masters of colleges, politicians and generals everywhere". These details give the game away; Elinor slips out of character. Barker's shoehorning in of a character's credentials like this is in fact what makes them less believable.
Bertha Mason, an overweight "materialization medium" that Paul is drawn to out of guilt over Kenny, is another example of Noondays tussle with realism. Her slangy speech is convincing and very funny ("Mucky old woman come to the door, you could've planted a row of tatties in her neck"); even better are Barker's descriptions of her ("chins, neck, breasts, belly --all pendulous--the sagging, wrinkled abdomen hanging so low it almost hid the fuzz of black hair beneath. Like a huge, white, half-melted candle she sat, eyes glazed, a fag end glued to her bottom lip"). Soon, however, a dizzying storyline, in which an aggressive dead soldier called Albert speaks through her, undermines this groundwork.
Art in the plots is pervasive, but it is at the same time something in the past, something lost. Elinor, for one, has given up painting (there's too much shopping, cleaning, ambulance driving to do), which is exactly what, in the previous two novels, she feared would happen if she ever married or if she acknowledged the war. ("I don't paint anything to do with it. Because the war sucks that in too. And I don't think it should be about that, I think painting should be about ... celebration. Praise", she tells her old tutor Henry Tonks, the famed historical figure at the Slade, before agreeing to make medical drawings with him of the wounded at a facial-reconstruction hospital towards the end of Toby's Room.) She starts a diary again--another thing she had abandoned --in which she admits, "I'm a pinprick, a speck, a bee floating and drowning on a pool of black water, surrounded by ever-expanding, concentric rings of silence". This woman is a pitiable shadow of the indefatigable, crop-haired, androgynous one we knew over twenty years ago. A commission from Kenneth Clark and his War Artists Advisory Committee spares her, though what they want are "rosy-cheeked", merry paintings of land girls and safely evacuated children, "definitely no guns".
As for Paul, he takes refuge in his studio these days not for painting, but for hiding his affair with a young warden--here, a mid-life crisis blends with a war crisis. When the clocks in his and Elinor's Bloomsbury home are stopped by a blast, he feels relief, as though "outside time": "nothing seemed to matter very much. Nothing he said or did now would have consequences". And Kit, after years of separation, taints his reunion with Paul by showing him Tonks's pastel drawing and photographs of his war-damaged face before surgery in 1917. Paul had seen it for real back then; nonetheless they shock him ("This was less a face than a landscape"). He used them as a way of reaching out, Paul tells himself later on, to get past their rivalry--over Elinor, over painting--which had always stopped them from being straightforward friends. It is a pallid explanation: Kit still calls Paul's paintings "vapour trails" ("Why was it, whenNevillesaid 'vapour', Paulheard 'vapid'? Because Neville bloody well meant him to, that's why") and resumes his protracted campaign to sleep with Elinor, far easier now that her marriage has been torn apart, Barker seems to say, like London. On his journey to seize Elinor, Kit notices the streets he passes: "here was sunlight streaming through a gap in the terrace, a gap where no gap should have been. All over London, now, were little patches of illicit gold".
Whether the city and these characters can restore themselves after such carnage is left in vague suspension. Elinor, perhaps, finds hope in drawing again: when the raids end, she is compelled to record the progress of the ruins around her each morning--"There seemed to be no crack so narrow, no fissure so apparently barren, it couldn't support the life of some weed or other"--as she once did with the mutilated faces during the First World War. The effect is precarious and moving.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Ross-Southall, Mika. "'I knew'." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5871, 9 Oct. 2015, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639761687/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=00246d5e. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Noonday
Pat Barker. Doubleday, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-53772-8
Barker concludes a trilogy that began with three students at the Slade School of Fine Art in the run-up to World War I (Life Class), in this third volume, which takes the former classmates to London during the Blitz in 1940. Elinor Brooke and Paul Tarrant are now married and middle-aged. Paul is an air raid warden, and Elinor drives an ambulance. The third classmate, their mutual friend Kit Neville, arrives from America, where he has left behind his wife and daughter, and goes to work for the Ministry of Information as a German translator. Despite all the death and destruction around them, all three still try to advance their painting careers. Elinor even receives a commission from Kenneth Clark of the War Artists Advisory Committee. But an indiscretion on Paul's part causes a rift in his marriage to Elinor, one that Kit, who says he has always loved her, sets out to exploit. And forever hanging over the story is the ghostly presence of Elinor's brother, Toby, killed in action during WWI. Unfortunately, Barker's depiction of how Londoners bravely put up with Hitler's nightly bombing raids feels flat and familiar. The narrative meanders among several new characters--Kenny, a lost boy of the Blitz, and Bertha Mason, a medium--to limited effect, before finishing up in a flurry of melodramatic plot developments. In the end, this is a disappointing third act to a series that lacks the impact of Barker's superior Regeneration trilogy. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Noonday." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 1, 4 Jan. 2016, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A439804132/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a025db7d. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
It cannot be too common for a novel set 4,000 years ago to chime so strongly with events of the present day, but Pat Barker's magnificent The Silence of the Girls does just that. It is a retelling of "The Iliad", the story of the Trojan War fought by men over a beautiful, voiceless woman, Helen--stolen from her home and sent to Troy. In Homer's epic poem, and in most subsequent tales of the Trojan War, the men take centre stage and their names are familiar to us still: Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus and Ajax. But Barker tells her story from the point of view of Briseis, who is queen of Lyrnessus at the beginning of the novel and Briseis' feelings about the hero Achilles are clear from the novel's devastating opening lines: "Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles ... How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those this; we called him 'the butcher."
As Briseis waits in the citadel, crowded in with all the other high-born women, Achilles and his army sack the city of Lyrnessus, massacre the men and rape the slaves. She is one of the "lucky" ones, taken by Achilles as a prize of war and shipped to the Greek camp on the battleground at Troy.
It is the current debate about power and control in sexual relationships and abuse, as evidenced by the online campaigns #MeToo and #TimesUp, that makes The Silence of the Girls an incredibly timely read. When Pat Barker speaks to me over the telephone from her home in Durham she relates, with some amazement, that while she was proof-reading the final manuscript of the novel she was "picking up the newspaper and reading something that seemed directly relevant to this book that was set in the Bronze Age! It's never happened to me before and it was most remarkable experience."
The Silence of the Girls is the first time that Barker has chosen to write about the ancient world, although some of her best-known novels have dealt with war and its consequences. The Ghost Road, which won Barker the Booker Prize in 1995, was the third part of the acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door) set against the First World War. As Barker points out, she is not alone in her fascination with the Greek myths. A number of contemporary novels have mined a similar seam. "It's not just me, I think there is a general movement at the moment among writers to go right back to the beginning." She cites Madeleine Miller's A Song of Achilles, Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a retelling of the myth of Antigone, and Colm Toibin's House of Names, about the death of Agamemnon and its roots in the killing of Iphigenia.
"Why are we doing it? Well, I don't think, as individuals, we are altogether aware of why we are doing it. Perhaps we are trying to go back to the beginning of European civilisation now because we instinctively feel that European civilisation might be coming to an end!" More optimistically, she reckons that a real cultural shift might be under way, in the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp, "and that would in itself, I think, trigger a kind of re-examining of the past [and the treatment of] women".
Barker can't recall exactly when she first read "The Iliad": "but I haven't a classical background or anything like that so I didn't read 'The Iliad' until I was more than adult." It made a deep impression--she remembers hearing "the silence of the girls as I think most women who read 'The Iliad' do"--but it took a while to surface creatively in her own work although she does tell me that one of the characters in her 2007 novel Life Class likens the silence in the Cafe Royal after the First World War has broken out to the silence of the girls during the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, so the idea had obviously been gestating for a decade or so.
"I do think that sometimes the seed that sets you off on the process of writing a novel can have been around for many years, even decades, before it actually --for some mysterious reason--comes to fruition" she says. "I think it's almost a good sign if an idea has been fermenting for quite a long time in a sort of semi-conscious way. I've learnt to distrust the staggeringly brilliant new idea that was triggered by something that happened quite recently. Ha ha! You need the dog-eared thing that's been around for a long time, quietly nagging away at you."
It was always Briseis she wanted to write about. "She has this very great fall, from being a queen to being a slave literally overnight," observes Barker. "Obviously that makes [the story] more dramatic, but it also gives her a background in which she has been used to having a certain amount of control over her life and even power within the confines of the palace." It is this that gives Barker's protagonist "a kind of resilience I think, a moral resilience, to what is happening to her. A younger girl, or a girl who had had no adult life, would not have the same resources."
She never considered writing the book from the point of view of a lower-born woman: "A girl who'd been a slave in one of the cities of the Trojan plains and she's just moved to be a slave in the Greek camp, I think they were probably quite phlegmatic about it; if you're a slave, does it really matter who you are a slave to?"
But telling the story from Briseis' point of view presented Barker with a technical problem. "You are brought very hard up against the fact that the person whose actions drive the story is Achilles, and there's no way around that. His anger is the engine that drives the plot. The first line [of 'The Iliad'] is 'Sing, oh divine muse, of the ruinous anger of Achilles.' It is his story but her voice. That's a first for me. Normally the central character is also the person who is driving the plot but she is so completely powerless in the situation she's been put in that she can't drive the plot. The most she can hope to do is bob along on the surface of the wave rather than actually sink."
A TRAUMATIC LIFE
When Briseis first arrives at the Greek camp she is deeply traumatised by what she has witnessed from the citadel. Barker writes of "the awful, straining, wide-eyed terror" of those early days. Briseis discovers, as Achilles' "prize of honour", his reward for killing 60 men in one day, that her only real duty is to wait on him and his captains at dinner and, of course, to be raped every night.
Barker does not shy away from describing the brutal reality of conquest and slavery, the massacres and the sexual violence, and this is a visceral novel, but not a bleak one. Through the camaraderie of her fellow "prizes"--the other high-born women--Briseis finds another identity within the camp, "not based on the way she looks or the function she performs in bed which is what she has been systematically reduced to". Briseis starts helping in the field hospital, mixing the herbs for medicine. "It's when she's got the pestle and mortar in her hands and she is learning about something that fascinates her, that she starts to come back to life and be a human being again. She has this insight that slaves are not just treated as objects, but there's a very real sense that a slave becomes an object, and thinks of herself as an object. Work, not love, is her way of reasserting her identity."
5 OF BARKER'S TOP SELLERS
REGENERATION
Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling], 9780141030937
First in the Regeneration trilogy and an exploration of how the trauma of the First World War brutalised a generation of young men.
135,885 SOLD *
THE EYE IN THE DOOR
Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling] 9780141030944
Second in the Regeneration trilogy and winner of the 1993 guardian fiction Prize.
74,292 SOLD *
LIFE CLASS
Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling], 9780141019475
First in the Life class trilogy. "Barker writes as brilliantly as ever ... with great tenderness and insight she conveys a wartime world turned upside down" Independent on Sunday.
70,147 sold
ANOTHER WORLD
Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling], 9780140258981
"Geordie is a beautifully realised character, tough, humorous, and finally enigmatic," Helen Dunmore, the Times.
65,254 SOLD *
BORDER CROSSING
Penguin, 8.99 [pounds sterling], 9780140270747
"Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it," Guardian
59,333 SOLD
METADATA
Imprint Hamish Hamilton
Pub date 30.08.18
Formats 18.99 [pounds sterling] HB/9.99 [pounds sterling] e-book/10 [pounds sterling] audio
ISBNs: 9780241338070/9780241983218/9780241984291
Rights sold five territories to date Inc US (Doubleday)
Editor Simon Prosser, Hamish Hamilton
Agent Clare alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Stage Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
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O'Keefe, Alice. "Pat Barker: Pat Barker's latest novel may be set 4,000 years ago but there are plenty of parallels with modernity." The Bookseller, no. 5801, 25 May 2018, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698713110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b455acd7. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Pat Barker
THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS
336pp. Hamish Hamilton. 18.99 [pounds sterling].
978 0 241 33807 0
Michael Hughes
COUNTRY
320pp. John Murray. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling].
978 1 4736 3653 8
Two new novels rewrite Homer's Iliad, exploring male attempts to possess women and land. For Pat Barker, this represents a departure from her previous work, not only because The Silence of the Girls is set in ancient Troy, rather than the battlefields of the First World War or the back alleys of north-east England, but because it involves a shift of perspective. To echo Virginia Woolf's praise for "the man-womanly mind of Shakespeare", I have long admired the woman-manly mind of Barker. In The Ghost Road (1995), for example, she makes us see "the bluish shadow between breasts thrust together by stays" through the eyes of a sex-starved soldier. In The Silence of the Girls she attempts the reverse exercise, namely to give voice to a woman who has, quite literally, become a possession: Briseis, the slave over whom Achilles and Agamemnon fall out. Her rewriting is part of a well-established trend (think Margaret Atwood's Penelopiador Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife), yet Barker takes on the task with unusual seriousness and a sense of uncertainty.
Narration from the point of view of Briseis raises some technical difficulties, since she cannot know many of the events Homer recounts. Barker gets around the problem by having her enter rooms unnoticed or eavesdrop from behind closed doors. Still, as the narrative develops, Briseis' perspective recedes and Barker ends up writing entire chapters in the third person. This allows her to stay closer to Homer and yields some of the best pages in the novel.
The unfortunate truth, though, is that Briseis fails to reach us even when she reports on what she is best placed to know. The central question of the novel--what happens to her once Achilles consents to handing her over to Agamemnon is hardly answered: "Nothing I hadn't been expecting" is all Briseis tells us. When, later on, Achilles asks her, she chooses to remain silent, neither confirming nor refuting Agamemnon's own claim that he never touched her. As for the effects of Agamemnon's violence, we are allowed to see them only through the eyes of a male observer: "he saw she had a split lip".
All this points to the psychological as well as the narrative difficulties of rewriting the Iliad from Briseis' point of view. We are never told, for example, to whom she is telling her story, even though her interlocutor occasionally formulates a question, which is printed in italics. Here, for example, Briseis recalls how Achilles changed, in bed, after she took to bathing in the sea:
He pummelled my chest with his clenched fists
and then, restraining himself, began stuffing wet
strands of my hair into his mouth. Then down to
my breasts again, taking the whole nipple into
his mouth and clamping down hard with his
jaws. You may be thinking: Why did this shock
you so much? I can only say again: this wasn't
a man, this was a child.
Perhaps, despite the suggestion of dialogue, Briseis is talking only to herself. Yet still we learn far more about Achilles' psyche, including his longing for his mother (the sea nymph Thetis), than about Briseis.
The question, then, becomes whether captive "girls" (Homer's term, as well as Barker's) must necessarily remain silent once they become possessions. Or, to put it bluntly: is the girl here silent because she needs to be or because Barker fails adequately to give voice to her? The answer, it seems, is both. Barker's attempt to give voice to Briseis is never facile, or forced, and for this restraint she deserves great credit. At the same time, it really does seem that she finds it harder to inhabit female characters than male ones. A comparison between Barker's novel and A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous day-by-day account of what happened when the German capital fell to Soviet troops at the end of the Second World War, proves instructive. When the army entered, the women had little choice: they were raped and raped again, in an act of territorial as well as sexual conquest. Faced with the same treatment, they reacted differently: some committed suicide at the prospect of violation, others managed to endure the most brutal attacks. The author herself, after being gang raped, put on a pretty dress and went out looking for the highest-ranking Soviet officer she could find, "a single wolf to keep away the pack". And she began to write. Different choices came down to age, experience, education, luck, but also to more intimate qualities including a preparedness for passivity and surrender. Barker allows the women only a very narrow emotional range. For example, we are told that Briseis is beautiful, but we never find out what she makes of her own beauty. Even Homer's Helen is more articulate than that: she curses her own attractiveness (in her language: "Aphrodite") yet also realizes that it provides her only protection. In Barker's novel we see Briseis train her eyes on Achilles--"an intent, unblinking stare", the stare of a mouse watching a hawk. But we learn little about what it feels to be that mouse. Ultimately, even while listening to Briseis, we retain our male perspective and feel observed by captive eyes.
Barker is at her most eloquent when she lets go of Briseis and simply tells the story. She never strays into sensationalism, despite her subject--a quality she shares with Homer. She offers similes that match those of the Iliad: the moon is caught behind a tree, "like a glinting silver fish in the black net of its branches"; the mouths of dying men open "like scarlet flowers". The Silence of the Girls confirms Barker not only as an exceptional writer, but as a patient and perceptive reader of Homer.
Where Barker's novel is restrained and even muted, Michael Hughes's Country explodes with verbal invention, rapid juxtaposition, brutality and fun. "Fury. Pure fury" is how he starts.
The blood was up. Lost the head completely.
Achill, the best sniper the IRA ever seen. All
called him Achill, but his name was plain Liam
O'Brien. After the da, Big Liam O'Brien, who
came out of Achill Island and bore the name
before him. So the son was called Achill in his
turn, though he was born and reared in Castlebar
and he'd never set foot in the place, for the da
always said it was a fearful hole.
And so Hughes continues, playing with names: the priest Chryses becomes Crisis Cunningham, a "Prod farmer from up the country"; Patroclus is Pat; the low-life Thersites is a man known as Thirsty; the pub where the IRA meet is called "The Ships"; Agamemnon is, quite simply, "Pig".
More important even than the names are all the Iliadic details of plot. The point is to remain faithful to the Homeric storyline, even while telling a mighty tale of strife within the Republican Army during the 1996 ceasefire. Those who know the Iliad can easily write down references to specific lines and passages in the margin of almost every page. Those who do not may end up enjoying Country even more, as they won't be yanked out of the narrative in order to admire the artistry. Instead they can focus on Hughes's linguistic dexterity, his ear for dialogue, his understanding of character, the energy of his prose, his quick summing up of politics: "wait to outbreed them, then push for a referendum".
The book is gripping, though I did wonder to what end Hughes needed Homer. Surely he is well capable of crafting a good plot without having to rely on the Iliad. Perhaps the choice comes down to a surplus of cleverness: reworking the ancient epic is a way for Hughes to keep himself amused. He has done this before, writing as Blake and Milton in his first novel, The Countenance Divine (2016); or, as he puts it himself, "when you hear some of the stories, you can see plain that the old times were not a bit different than today". More interesting is the specific choice of alignment, particularly given current politics: in Hughes's novel, the IRA are the Greeks; in Homer, the Greeks eventually win the war.
Caption: Rose Byrne as Briseis in Troy (2004)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Graziosi, Barbara. "The blood was up: Two retellings of the Iliad." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6021-6022, 24 Aug. 2018, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634285192/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dd92400. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker. Doubleday, $27.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-385-54421-4
Barker, author of the Booker-winning The Ghost Road, speculates about the fate of the women taken captive during the Trojan War, as related in Homer's Iliad. Briseis, queen of the small country of Lyrnessus, was captured by the Greek forces and awarded to Achilles, fated to serve him as slave and concubine. Through her eyes readers see the horror of war: the sea of blood and corpses, the looting, and the drunken aftermath of battle. When Agamemnon demands that Briseis be handed over to him, Achilles reacts with rage and refuses to fight, and when his foster brother and lover Patrocles is killed, having gone into battle in Achilles's stead, Briseis becomes the unwitting catalyst of a turning point in the war. In Barker's hands, the conflict takes on a new dimension, with revisionist portraits of Achilles ("we called him the butcher") and Patroclus (he had "taken his mother's place" in Achilles's heart). Despite its strong narrative line and transportive scenes of ancient life, however, this novel lacks the lyrical cadences and magical intensity of Madeline Miller's Circe, another recent revising of Greek mythology. The use of British contemporary slang in the dialogue is jarring, and detracts from the story's intensity. Yet this remains a suspenseful and moving illumination of women's fates in wartime. (Sept.)
Caption: Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls is a moving illumination of women's fates in wartime (reviewed on this page).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The Silence of the Girls." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 28, 9 July 2018, pp. 64+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547988519/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cbbab8ce. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barker, Pat THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $27.95 9, 11 ISBN: 978-0-385-54421-4
An accomplished hand at historical fiction respins the final weeks of the Trojan War.
For her 14th novel, Booker Prize-winning Barker plucks her direction from the first line of the Iliad: "Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles...." The archetypal Greek warrior's battle cries ring throughout these pages, beginning on the first. The novel opens as Achilles and his soldiers sack Lyrnessus, closing in on the women and children hiding in the citadel. Narrating their terrifying approach is Briseis, the local queen who sees her husband and brothers slaughtered below. She makes a fateful choice not to follow her cousin over the parapet to her death. She becomes instead Achilles' war trophy. Briseis calls herself "a disappointment...a skinny little thing, all hair and eyes and scarcely a curve in sight." But in the Greek military encampment on the outskirts of Troy, she stirs much lust, including in the commander Agamemnon. So far, so faithful to Homer. Barker's innovation rests in the female perspective, something she wove masterfully into her Regeneration and Life Class trilogies about World War I. Here she gives Briseis a wry voice and a watchful nature; she likens herself as a mouse to Achilles' hawk. Even as the men boast and drink and fight their way toward immortality, the camp women live outwardly by Barker's title. Their lives depend on knowing their place: "Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men." Barker writes 47 brisk chapters of smooth sentences; her dialogue, as usual, hums with intelligence. But unlike her World War I novels, the verisimilitude quickly thins. Her knowledge of antiquity is not nearly as assured as Madeline Miller's in The Song of Achilles and Circe. Barker's prose is awkwardly thick with Briticisms--breasts are "wrinkled dugs" or "knockers." And she mistakenly gives the Greeks a military field hospital, which was an innovation of the Romans.
A depiction of Achilles' endless grief for Patroclus becomes itself nearly endless.
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"Barker, Pat: THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A546323318/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a72067a5. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The slave-girl's tale
The Silence of the Girls. By Pat Barker. Doubleday; 304 pages. Hamish Hamilton.
BRISEIS, an enslaved Trojan queen, speaks only once in the "Iliad". Yet she is crucial to Homer's epic: Agamemnon's seizure of her from Achilles enrages the Greeks' indispensable warrior, leading to his withdrawal from the battlefield. In "The Silence of the Girls", Pat Barker makes Briseis her central character. The result is a masterful and moving novel.
Ms Barker, a British writer best known for the "Regeneration" trilogy about the first world war, gives Briseis and the other Trojan slave-girls voices that feel refreshingly modern, steeped in history though they are. They are bawdy, motherly, angry and abused. They keep watch on the men who killed their relatives and now treat them as sexual objects. Domestic details are piercingly described, bringing the squalor of the camp to life:
Even from that distance I caught the stench of sweat, today's sweat, still fresh, but under that the stale sweat of other days and other nights, receding into the far distance, the darkness, all the way back to the first year of this interminable war.
The story flickers between Briseis's recollections and a third-person narration of the progress of the war. This combination allows Ms Barker to switch nimbly between the daily drudgery of the camp and the horrors of conflict, described in all their gut-spilling drama. It gives the novel the pace of a thriller, blood-soaked spears and shields suddenly glistening on the page, while also making the characters painfully real.
Through Briseis's eyes the relationship between Achilles and his manservant (and presumed lover) Patroclus is acutely observed. She glimpses them on the beach, leaning forehead to forehead, a moment of tenderness in a callous world. Later, she befriends Patroclus almost against her will. She even comes to half-love Achilles, her captor.
In this telling Achilles, notionally a demi-god, is a flawed, fleshy mortal. When Patroclus is killed in battle (disguised as Achilles), his devastation is visceral. Ms Barker zooms out to relay the isolating quality of mourning:
Nobody looks him in the face now, it's as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they'll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they're incapable of it, because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.
Her use of similes is almost Homeric in its brilliance. When Nestor, a wily Greek leader, first suggests that Patroclus might fight in Achilles's place, he sees "possibilities work like maggots under the young man's skin". In the women's hut, "faces, clustering round the lights, shone like the pale wings of moths". In Ms Barker's hands, these venerable scenes and mythic names magically become new.
The Silence of the Girls.
By Pat Barker.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"Achilles and the heels; Reimagining Homer." The Economist, vol. 428, no. 9109, 15 Sept. 2018, p. 89(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A554094607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=761bf978. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Silence of the Girls
by Pat Barker
Hamish Hamilton, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 325
Sing muse, begins The Iliad, of the wrath of Achilles. We are dropped straight into the tenth year of the Trojan war, in the middle of the Greek encampment outside the besieged city. The great warrior Achilles has been awarded a woman, Briseis, in recognition of his victories. The same distribution of booty sees Agamemnon, the leader of all the Greeks, acquire the young Chryseis. Rape, assault and erasure of identity are the ever-present consequences of war for women in the Bronze Age, just as they are now. But Chryseis is different: her father is a priest of Apollo, and he comes to the Greek camp to demand the return of his daughter.
Agamemnon refuses at first, but is then forced to relinquish his prize when Apollo hears his priest and attacks the Greek camp with plague. In a fit of pique, Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, and so the greatest sulk in literature begins. Achilles withdraws from the battle, heedless of the destruction which the Trojans wreak upon his fellow Greeks.
Pat Barker's affecting new novel, The Silence of the Girls, begins slightly earlier in the story, when Briseis is captured in a raid masterminded by Achilles. His incredible fighting prowess is powerfully described by a woman whose life is being destroyed by it: 'My husband, died with both hands gripping Achilles' spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away.'
Briseis is a memorable creation (Homer's version has little character, so this is all Barker's imagination). She is numb with shock at her terrible losses. But right from the start of the novel, we see that she is no sentimentalist. Her vicious mother-in-law has been wasting away from an unknown illness and Briseis goes to check on her as their citadel is about to fall to the Greeks: 'I had no reason to love her, but what made me angry at that moment was that in allowing herself to dwindle until she was nothing more than a heap of creased flesh and jutting bone, she'd left me with so very little to hate.'
Barker has always written brilliantly about war, about battles and about the interior lives of often nameless fighting men. The Regeneration trilogy left her readers living and breathing alongside her battered, broken soldiers. The Silence of the Girls lacks some of the potency of those novels, because of the strangely clunky anachronisms. It doesn't matter too much if Priam enchants a young Briseis with magic tricks involving coins and sweets, although the Trojan war happens many centuries before either money or sugar. But there's also a hospital hut, a knowledge of how to treat infection, and tents containing cupboards and sideboards. Briseis seems to know things (about time, particularly, and language) which a Bronze Age person could not have done.
Although it is densely imagined and beautifully written, these things mount up to strand the book in an uncomfortable noman's-land, somewhere between the Troad Peninsula and a couple of miles down the road from Ypres.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Haynes, Natalie. "Lost in Troadia." Spectator, vol. 338, no. 9917, 22 Sept. 2018, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A556838790/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=41c07fb4. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
As women across the globe come forward with stories of harassment, abuse, and oppression, novelist Pat Barker is giving voice to fictional women in a classic piece of literature. In The Silence of Girls, out in September from Doubleday, she tells the story of The Iliad from a female perspective.
Barker's narrator is Briseis, a princess of Troy, captured by Achilles in the Trojan War. The author follows the narrative of Homer's Greek epic poem closely, deviating only slightly to illustrate the fall of Troy and the women's fate, as witnessed by Briseis.
Briseis's plotline, Barker says, represents the most dramatic story in The Iliad: "She is literally a queen one day, and the next day a slave. She horrifically witnesses the death of her youngest brother, Patroclus, to whom she was particularly close. That same night, she's in the bed of Achilles, the man who killed him. You cannot have a more dramatic reversal of fortunes than that."
Briseis tells her story to an anonymous listener, perhaps a visitor from the future. She defends her choices, Barker says, to "somebody who might criticize her for trying to set up her marriage to Achilles, done while she's ostensibly lamenting the death of Patroclus."
The act of picking up and moving on, Barker says, is at the heart of The Silence. "It's tracing the steps Briseis takes in order to recover and be a person again."
The novel follows two strands of Barker's work: women's experiences and men in combat. Those familiar with Barker's books will recognize parallel themes in this one: the complex hierarchy of social class and how it can shift, the aftereffects of war, and the way women talk when there are no men around.
The 75-year-old British novelist is well-versed in historical fiction--and novels about war, in particular. Her popular Regeneration trilogy explores the effects of combat on British army officers in World War I through dialogue with their therapists. Other novels--The Silence is her 14th--capture different periods of 20th-century British history. Reese's grandfather fought in WWI, and one of Barker's early memories is seeing his bayonet wound.
Combat in The Iliad depicts the "starkness of the individual hero," Barker says. "It's always two individual men facing each other." She contrasts this with the "mechanized industrial wars of the last century."
Barker says Achilles's introspection in The Iliad--his struggle to decide what is worth fighting for--drew her to the material. "Achilles is not just questioning his own previous behavior, he's questioning the values of epic poetry and the values of The Iliad itself. When you see Achilles doing that, you know you're in the hands of a great poet."
Barker's fascination with war could also come from observing her mother, who was raised in a working-class family, joined the Women's Royal Naval Service during WWII, and "adored" the war, Barker says, partly because she was serving her country and partly because it was an "adventure": "A lot of working-class women scarcely went beyond the end of the street once they were married. To go off, hundreds of miles away from home, and be with other women from all classes of society--all that was very stimulating."
The women forced into sexual slavery in the camps in The
Silence have a range of reactions. Briseis's story is different from the stories the other women in the camp might have told. "As Briseis points out, there's no uniform descent into misery and degradation," Barker says. "The particularly pretty girl is doing rather better than the woman who was her mistress, who is getting on a bit and doesn't count as much."
Some of these women experience the same feeling of liberation that Barker's mother may have felt. Ossa, for instance, was a courtesan before being captured by the Greeks. "To have only one man to service--a fairly straightforward, uncomplicated man, sexually, at least--was a holiday for her," Barker says.
Yet other women's situations are darker. For instance, Chriseis, a priest's daughter, was only 15 when she was captured and raped.
Briseis, married at the age of 17, is "somewhere in the middle," Barker notes. In war, "you do begin to adjust," she adds. "You begin to realize that your past life is over. Whether you want to cope with the present reality or not, you have to cope with it."
One can think of Briseis as a predecessor to Offred in The Handmaid's Tale. She is headstrong, smart, and able to manipulate her situation "using the very miniscule amount of power and freedom of choice that she has," Barker says. She does, at one point, try to escape, but aborts the plan when she realizes that freedom would put her in more danger.
Barker has a knack for capturing the voices of women in everyday life and says she sees the "immensely powerful grapevine between women" as a feature of women's history--and a way to make progress. "You can view some Victorian novels as coded messages between women," she says. "Jane Eyre is a notable example. Women have always had this capacity to convey support or intimation to other women. In cases of sexual harassment, that kind of oral grapevine should still be operating--particularly for young women."
Barker cites Simone Weil's 'The Iliad,' or the Poem of Force, which analyzes the effects of force and enslavement in The Iliad, as an influence. She also considers the Zidi women in Syria and Iraq, bought and sold in markets, as examples of modern slavery.
The arrival of The Silence of the Girls couldn't be more apropos. Recently, Barker says, Jess Phillips, a British member of Parliament, "spoke out on a controversial issue--which was not only her right but her duty to do--and received 600 rape threats." She adds, "The issues at stake in The Silence are also being played out in modern society. What I felt the last few months of working on the book, and editing it, was that it seemed to become more and more topical."
The events described in the book, Barker says, are on par with "the very worst atrocities that have happened, or are happening, in the modern world--we shouldn't kid ourselves about that at all."
Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Ky., who contributes to JSTOR Daily, Longreads, Undark magazine, Vice, Vox, and other publications.
BY HOPE REESE
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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Reese, Hope. "WOMEN OF TROY." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 33, 13 Aug. 2018, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A550998375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8c41bce6. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Women of Troy
Pat Barker. Doubleday, $27.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-385-54669-0
In Barker's masterly continuation of her fiercely feminist take on Homer's Iliad (after The Silence of the Girls), the Greeks drag their wooden horse into Troy and achieve victory after a 10-year siege, but a freak storm prevents their ships from returning home. As time drags on, Briseis, the heroine of the previous installment, struggles to survive as an enemy noncombatant prisoner in the siege camp. A former queen of a Trojan ally, she was kidnapped by Achilles as his prize of honor and turned into his sex slave. But now Achilles is dead and Briseis is pregnant. Handed down to Lord Alcimus as his wife, she spends her days, as soldiers play football with a human head, commiserating with the other Trojan women--Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache and, of course, Helen, the cause of the war. Briseis shares narrative duties with Pyrrhus, the bloodthirsty son of Achilles, and Calchas, a canny priest of Troy. In a novel filled with names from legend, Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave, smart and loyal. The author makes strategic use of anachronistic language ("living in the real world," "keep a low profile") to illuminate characters living at the dawn of myth. Barker's latest is a wonder. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Aug.)
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"The Women of Troy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 23, 7 June 2021, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A665461498/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1f385a8f. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barker, Pat THE WOMEN OF TROY Doubleday (Fiction None) $27.95 8, 24 ISBN: 978-0-385-54669-0
Engrossing follow-up to the gritty reimagining of the Trojan War begun in The Silence of the Girls (2018).
Barker opens “inside the horse’s gut: heat, darkness, sweat, fear,” as Greek soldiers wait to see if the Trojans will wheel the wooden horse into the city and seal its fate. We look through the eyes of Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, terrified that he will never live up to the mighty reputation of his dead father. The insecurity behind male violence is a theme from the moment Pyrrhus blunderingly hacks to death Trojan king Priam in front of an altar, a sacrilege that is punished by winds that make it impossible for the Greek ships to set sail for home. Briseis, the enslaved narrator of the previous novel, picks up the story in Chapter 3. Now pregnant with Achilles’ child and married (at his request) to a Greek warrior, she’s well aware that any misstep on her part could send her back to the slave quarters. Trouble stirs there with Amina, who is determined to properly bury Priam’s maimed corpse, left to rot in the open by Pyrrhus. “You’re a girl, Amina. You can’t fight the kings,” Briseis wearily tells her. Her hard-won knowledge that “the only thing that mattered in this camp was power” doesn’t prevent Briseis from feeling sympathy in addition to exasperation for idealistic Amina, vengeance-obsessed Trojan royals Hecuba and Cassandra (now slaves), and even for brutal, conflicted Pyrrhus and other male characters drawn with the same shrewdness. Barker’s blunt, earthy prose strips the romance from Greek mythology, revealing its foundations in murder and oppression, yet she also understands—and conveys—the stark appeal of these ancient stories as she asks us to reconsider them through the eyes of their victims. As with her masterful Regeneration trilogy, the inconclusive close of this volume leaves readers hungry to know what happens next to a host of complex and engaging characters.
Vintage Barker: challenging, stimulating, and profoundly satisfying.
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"Barker, Pat: THE WOMEN OF TROY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A667042172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9a0c0eaf. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Women of Troy. By Pat Barker. Aug. 2021. 304p. Doubleday, $27.95 (9780385546690).
Barker's sequel to The Silence of the Girls (2018) continues the story of Queen Briseis, given as a war prize to Achilles. After Achilles' death, the pregnant Briseis' marriage to his comrade Alcimus offers a modicum of security and status as a wife, rather than a powerless slave and concubine. Through Briseis' eyes, readers experience the aftermath of the fall of Troy. What should be a triumphant victory sours as Priam's body is left unburied and the gods send unfavorable winds to prevent the Greeks from leaving for home. Briseis is an engaging character, both pragmatic and perceptive, providing keen insight into monsters such as Pyrrhus, as well as the women of Troy. Also brought to life are Hecuba, old, ill, and revenge-crazed; traumatized Andromache; Cassandra, cursed by the gods with prophecies no one believes; and beautiful Helen, right back where she began, in Menelaus' bed, while the entire world loathes her. Briseis' story doesn't end with the last page; Barker seems set to pick up her absorbing narrative in a future volume as the Greeks finally set sail for home.--Bethany Latham
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Latham, Bethany. "The Women of Troy." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230185/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a521cc49. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Byline: Wendy Smith
By Pat Barker
Doubleday. 304 pp. $28
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From her early novels about working-class women in industrial northern England, through and beyond her Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy, a blistering portrait of soldiers shattered by World War I, Pat Barker's work has been centrally concerned with the role violence plays in our lives. The grim lot of women in wartime is foregrounded in her new novel, "The Women of Troy," which continues a feminist reassessment of the Trojan War begun in "The Silence of the Girls" (2018).
The narrator, Briseis, was enslaved to Achilles in the first book after he killed her husband and brothers before the siege of Troy. Now, in the wake of the city's capture and Achilles's death, she is free and married to one of his loyal followers because she is pregnant with Achilles's child. "I was the casket that contained the crown jewels," she remarks. "As a person, I didn't count at all." She knows there are worse fates. Trojan princess Cassandra was raped in Athena's temple as the city fell. Women too old to bear children were sent to slave markets to be "picked up cheap and worked to death." Around the camp, Briseis sees women scrabbling "for scraps around the cooking fires," groped while they serve dinner, malignantly toyed with by soldiers as a prelude to gang rape.
Yet "The Women of Troy" also reckons with the scarifying effect of violence on men. It opens "inside the horse's gut: heat, darkness, sweat fear," as Achilles's 16-year-old son Pyrrhus and other Greek soldiers wait in silence to see if the Trojans will roll the enormous wooden horse inside the city walls. Barker, always adept at evoking brute physical discomfort and its psychic toll, takes Pyrrhus's worry that his roiling gut means he'll be the first to use the latrine bucket as a window into his underlying fear that he will never live up to the reputation of his father: glorious Achilles, the Greeks' greatest warrior.
Pyrrhus is the novel's most interesting character after Briseis, ensnared by the imperative to dominate and subdue as surely as she and the other women are trapped in servitude and submission. His desperate need to prove himself makes him exceedingly dangerous. His actions over the course of the final battle for Troy and its long aftermath are brutal and deadly; Barker does not ask us to forgive Pyrrhus, simply to understand him. The same goes for the soldiers Briseis sees playing football with a human head; she knows they are restless and anxious, waiting for the gale-force wind that prevents the Greek ships from sailing home to subside and wondering what offense against the gods keeps it blowing day after day.
"The Women of Troy" takes place in the uneasy interregnum between the Greeks' victory and their departure. The plot is driven by efforts to blame someone for the unfavorable wind and to identify the Trojan who clandestinely buried the corpse of King Priam, clumsily hacked to death by Pyrrhus and left to be picked over by crows. For the crows, Briseis sardonically observes, war "only ever meant food. They didn't care who won or lost; their day always ended well."
Barker's prose has a plain force more powerful than fancy wordsmithing; she makes these long-ago events immediate. "Kill all the men and boys, impregnate the women," thinks Briseis, linking her unwanted pregnancy in a mythic time to present-day ethnic cleansing: "They meant to erase an entire people." The blasted Trojan landscape - once-fertile farmland scarred by "chariot wheels and the tramp of marching feet," a beach strewn with dead sea creatures - reminds us that the devastation we wreak on the Earth is by no means a modern phenomenon.
Violence is an eternal component of the human experience, Barker suggests, a tool for achieving power and status that we seize eagerly and relinquish reluctantly. That is certainly Briseis's view. She's a pragmatist who rolls her eyes at vengeance-obsessed Trojan queen Hecuba's refusal to understand the reality of her new, enslaved condition. She's appalled by the "solitary, joyless rectitude" of another enslaved Trojan who insists on covertly burying Priam and performing funeral rites at the grave.
Briseis has chosen to adapt and survive in a world where "the only thing that mattered ... was power." That doesn't mean she thinks this is right; she repeats with bitter irony the judgment that Pyrrhus had "a good war" and the characterization of herself as Achilles's "prize of honour" - "phrases that blister my tongue." She cautiously nurtures and protects the enslaved people sequestered in the women's quarters, and when she absolutely must she risks her life and privileges to pay what she sees as a personal debt. She is a reluctant hero, but a hero nonetheless.
The novel closes with the Greek ships finally able to embark, carrying Briseis and her companions to new lives in unknown lands. Asides throughout reveal that Briseis is telling this story from a vantage point 50 years on and hint that there will be another volume to chronicle her life after Troy. More work from one of contemporary literature's most thoughtful and compelling writers is always welcome.
- - -
Wendy Smith is the author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The Washington Post
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Smith, Wendy. "Book World: Pat Barker's 'The Women of Troy' continues her brilliant reassessment of the Trojan War." Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673038411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=480027a6. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Voyage Home
by Pat Barker
Hamish Hamilton, [pounds sterling]20, pp. 336
Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus's Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon's return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra's maid, her intimate 'catch-fart'. (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.)
Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim. Clytemnestra, disdainful and contemptuous, is his nemesis, and Cassandra, Priam's daughter, given to him as a trophy by the army, becomes his second wife. She has the gift of prophecy but is cursed with the knowledge that no one will believe her. She foretells Agamemnon's death as punishment for what he has done to Troy--'he pulverised it'--and knows that she will die simultaneously. She is damned: 'You can't cherry-pick a prophecy. It's fulfilled in its entirety or not at all.'
Clytemnestra has vowed vengeance. The tyrant Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia for a fair wind to sail home. He allowed the boys of Troy to be thrown from the battlements. In Mycenae, many women revile him because they lost husbands and sons in his war. Contemporary tyrants should beware: wives and parents think the same in any age. Agamemnon has returned a physical wreck. Ritsa reflects on Greek attitudes to male nudity compared with the more reserved view of the Trojans: 'Looking at Agamemnon's balls, I thought our attitude had much to recommend it.' He is stabbed to death.
Barker sometimes switches from past to present tense. The trick gives urgency and immediacy to her dramatic narrative. Her imagery is resourceful and always an emphatic embellishment. The stench of decay below deck is 'like rotting lilies left in a vase'; the frail Electra's ribs 'stood out like strings of a lyre'.
At the end of this provocative, inspiring novel, Clytemnestra awaits the Furies--'they never back off'. And resentful Orestes, held back from the war by his caring mother--'a mother's place is always in the wrong'--awaits his fate. Agamemnon has proved that 'men begin and end their lives as helpless lumps of flesh in the hands of women'.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Martin, Brian. "The victor as victim." Spectator, vol. 355, no. 10225, 17 Aug. 2024, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809155721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=522a07d0. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barker, Pat THE VOYAGE HOME Doubleday (Fiction None) $29.00 12, 3 ISBN: 9780385549110
The third volume in Barker's Trojan War series moves to Mycenae for a bloody climax.
Briseis, the enslaved Trojan princess who narrated the fall of Troy and ensuing wait for the Greeks to sail home inThe Silence of the Girls (2018) andThe Women of Troy (2021), is replaced here by Ritsa, a fellow Trojan who was her close friend. Ritsa is charged with babysitting Cassandra, daughter of the fallen King Priam, who is now enslaved to victorious Greek commander Agamemnon and proclaims that they will be killed in Mycenae. Indeed, readers soon meet Clytemnestra--in close third-person chapters alternating with Ritsa's slave's-eye first person--who is plotting to revenge herself on Agamemnon for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. But Ritsa's master, Machaon, dismisses this idea: "Frightened? Of hiswife?...She'll jump if he tells her to." Ritsa, as punchy a narrator as Briseis, voices the feminist critique central to all three novels in response. "Pure reflex that, an automatic assertion of the rights of men." Barker's use of blunt British vernacular to revive this ancient Greek tale remains as effective as ever. Her latest volume adds a new note to its predecessors' grim catalogues of brutalities. It's decidedly creepy; the palace rustles with the voices of invisible children who leave handprints and footprints that keep reappearing no matter how often they're scrubbed off. They are the children Agamemnon's father, Atreus, murdered and served in a pie to their father, his brother. But they are also "all the other little boys hurled to their deaths, the babies tossed into the air and caught on spears while their mothers were made to watch" as the victorious Greeks overran fallen Troy. Barker's vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people's sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge.
More brilliant work from one of world literature's greatest writers.
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"Barker, Pat: THE VOYAGE HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898415/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6e477122. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
THE VOYAGE HOME
PAT BARKER
289pp. Hamish Hamilton. 20 [pounds sterling].
Reanimated female figures from classical mythology have become profusely voluble in recent fiction. From Helen to Hecuba, Medea to Medusa, Circe to Clytemnestra and Ariadne to Atalanta, they have attained belated audibility as central characters in numerous novels, returned to tell their side of the story.
Giving voice to the voiceless--the ignored or suppressed--has, of course, been a prominent concern in contemporary fiction, and from the start of her career Pat Barker has been at the forefront of this enterprise. Her first two novels, Union Street (1982) and Blow Your House Down (1984), aimed to make heard the world of working-class women in her native northeast England. With Regeneration (1991), which initiated her acclaimed trilogy about the First World War, Barker moved on to silence of another kind.
"All my interest in war comes from what is not said", she once declared in The Times (July 1, 2007). Regeneration teems with instances of this. Among the "war neurosis" casualties in its setting, Craiglockhart, the Edinburgh hospital where officers invalided from the Western Front receive treatment, is a lieutenant stunned into dumbness by the unspeakable horrors he has witnessed, culminating in a shell attack that left him holding a man's eyeball on the palm of his shaking hand. Psychosomatic stammering and choking are rife among the patients at Craiglockhart (who include Wilfred Owen). Hostility prickles between a doctor brutally eager to galvanize men out of their mutism by applying fierce electric shocks to the throat and the army psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who conducts psychotherapy sessions. One of his patients is the soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose anti-war protests the military authorities are striving to silence. The next novel in the sequence, The Eye in the Door (1993), shows censorship and the gagging of free speech grimly worsening in the war-worn nation.
"There are lots of speech impediments in my work, of one kind or another", Barker remarked in that same Times interview. This is both true and ironic, given her flair for dialogue. The attempt to overcome impediments to communicating the atrocities of war was also central to her second trilogy concerning the traumas of 1914-18. In Life Class (2007), Toby's Room (2012) and Noonday (2015), the focus swivelled from the verbal to the visual, to consider a group of artists (fictional composites of the talented prewar generation of painters at the Slade: Paul Nash, Dora Carrington, Christopher Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer) who are trying to convey the carnage of the trenches and its crippling after-effects. Barker's sole novel about contemporary warfare, Double Vision (2003)--whose epigraph, from Goya's The Disasters of War series, is "One cannot look at this. I saw it. This is the truth"--had as its main figures a combat-zone photographer and a war reporter emotionally burnt out by what he has witnessed in Bosnia and Afghanistan.
With The Silence of the Girls (2018), Barker harked back to European literature's archetypal armed conflict: the Trojan War. "What I took away from my first reading", she has said of the Iliad, "was silence, because the girls whose fates are being decided say not a word. I knew I was going to have to write about it one day: about the experience of those silenced girls" (the Guardian, August 7, 2021). The Women of Troy (2021) continued her chronicling of that experience, a trilogy she now completes with The Voyage Home.
Affording ideal scope for tracing trauma, aftermath and the eventual emergence of new ways of life, the trilogy format well suits Barker's enduring preoccupations. It is also, as Greek drama showed, well suited to the theme of uncoiling nemesis after primal crime. In The Voyage Home, all of this combines. Partly, the novel portrays the closing phase of the Greeks' ten-year siege of Troy. Opening with Achilles' triumphant battle cry ringing round the doomed city, The Silence of the Girls was suffused with the terror and turmoil of Troy's devastation. In The Women of Troy, its "black and broken towers, like the fingers of a half-buried hand pointing accusingly at the sky", were the backdrop to the camp on the shore where the increasingly fractious Greeks awaited a long-delayed shift in the wind to sail home.
The Voyage Home begins with the arrival of that favourable wind. Busy preparations are made to abandon the military camp and a city reduced to rubble. The harbour fills with "brown, fat-bellied cargo ships, sitting low in the water", crammed with loot from Troy (including raped, enslaved women distributed to the victors). Black, beaked warships assemble to escort the fleet. As drums beat, sails swell and wind thrums in the rigging, all seems set for a buoyant return for the Greek expeditionary force. But, as the novel starts to intimate, one legendary story line will soon be intertwining with another. Awaiting Agamemnon, the conqueror of Troy, are the horrors of the house of Atreus.
True to Barker's aim of opening a female perspective on the events of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls was narrated by Briseis, the queen of one of Troy's satellite cities, Lyrnessus, who was handed to Achilles as a "prize of honour" (ie a spoil of war). Briseis also largely narrated The Women of Troy. In The Voyage Home, the spokeswoman is Ritsa, a friend of Briseis from Troy, now subjugated to serving Agamemnon's war-trophy wife Cassandra (who, along with his wife in Mycenae, Clytemnestra, balefully preparing for his return, features in some third-person scenes). Cassandra, the prophetess cursed by Apollo never to be believed, presents a variant on Barker's persisting engagement with modes of muteness. Frenziedly voluble, screaming out accurate predictions, she is nonetheless unable to communicate.
An uncanny sheen flickers over scenes at Mycenae, where Clytemnestra will take murderous revenge on Agamemnon for ritually sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia, ten years earlier, to gain a fair wind to Troy for his war fleet. Ghostly children's voices shrill in the palace's labyrinthine corridors. Little spectral handprints appear on its walls and small wet footprints mysteriously materialize near its well. They function as eerie reminders of Atreus' butchering of his brother's children, which unleashed a grisly chain reaction of bloodshed. But the supernatural note they strike can seem weirdly remote from the pungent physicality that gives most of the book its impact.
Deliberate anachronisms--a near-echo of Lady Macbeth, snatches of British soldiers' songs--intermittently occur, as if to emphasize the perennial nature of warfare. To similar effect, Barker's Greek and Trojan warriors were earlier shown bogged down in a battlefield of trenches, duckboards, sandbags and puffed-up generals resembling an eastern Mediterranean Western Front. Likewise, the mutually supportive female resilience portrayed throughout her Trojan trilogy mirrors that of the Tyneside working-class women banded together against male violence in Blow Your House Down. Analogies with present-day "rape camps", attempted genocides and forced mass evacuations are graphically brought to mind in Barker's reworking of heroic myth.
The current plethora of retellings of Greek legend can seem rather numbing. (Medusa has re-emerged in so many novels as a garrulous Gorgon that there seems less risk of petrifaction by her gaze than of being bored rigid by her self-justifying recollections.) But the trilogy that The Voyage Home concludes stands out as the work of a novelist matchless in her imaginative and informed response to war.
Peter Kemp's most recent book is Retroland: A reader's guide to the dazzling diversity of modern fiction, 2023
Caption: "Achilles' surrender of Briseis to Agamemnon"; from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
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Kemp, Peter. "At the House of Atreus: The final instalment of Pat Barker's Trojan War trilogy." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6334-6335, 23 Aug. 2024, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805791321/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ac7431d. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Long before Bing Crosby crooned "I'll Be Home for Christmas" during World War II, we were entranced by songs of soldiers pining for home. But those earliest songs were rarely so sweet. Consider that Western literature begins, in part, with a Greek epic about Odysseus's deadly 10-year struggle to get back to Ithaca after obliterating Troy.
And at the center of "The Odyssey" sits a ghastly, parallel anecdote about Agamemnon's homecoming. Expecting a great celebration, the victorious warrior returned with Cassandra, a Trojan concubine, at his side. The welcome committee was ready: Agamemnon and Cassandra were slaughtered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover.
In Emily Wilson's brilliant 2018 translation of "The Odyssey," Agamemnon's spirit, wandering in the underworld, still can't believe how wickedly his wife behaved:
"As I lay dying, struck through by the sword,
"I tried to lift my arms up from the ground.
"That she-dog turned away. I went to Hades.
"She did not even shut my eyes or close
"my mouth. There is no more disgusting act
"than when a wife betrays a man like that.
"That woman formed a plot to murder me!
"Her husband!"
This is what we in the biz call spin.
It turns out there is a more disgusting act than when a wife betrays a man. In his outraged condemnation of his wife, Agamemnon neglects to mention that before sailing off to Troy, he earned a fair wind from the gods by sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Clytemnestra - "that she-dog" - had had years to chew on the bone of her revenge until he came back home.
As Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller and other writers (like Sophocles) have shown, the story of war sounds entirely different when it's told by women captured, waiting or grieving. That radical shift in perspective is the engine of Pat Barker's gripping reevaluation of the Trojan War. Her multi-book project began in 2018 with "The Silence of the Girls," continued in 2021 with "The Women of Troy" and now comes back to Mycenae in "The Voyage Home."
The first two volumes of Barker's series focused on Briseis, the captured queen who becomes an object of contention between Achilles and Agamemnon in "The Iliad." In the early pages of "The Voyage Home," we see Briseis on the shore waving goodbye to our new narrator, Ritsa. Agamemnon and his men are returning home with their spoils - Ritsa among them. Once a freewoman and a healer, Ritsa has been assigned to attend to Cassandra, a virgin priestess of Apollo captured and forcibly married to Agamemnon.
As enslaved women with different standing, Ritsa and Cassandra maintain a fascinatingly ambiguous relationship. Though the former priestess retains no real power, she still clings to the attitude of her despoiled glory, while Ritsa treats her with a mixture of deference and condescension, exasperation and pity, knowing that her own survival is linked to this pompous, unstable woman who believes she can foresee the future.
This is a novel about how women respond to unendurable trauma - the destruction of their homes, the murder of all their loved ones, the prospect of endless sexual violence. But what makes this so fresh and engaging is Barker's ability to translate these ancient people into vernacular voices that dissolve the millennia separating us. They are not mythical beings, animated statues or marble friezes striking new poses. They're sweating, smelly people. Agamemnon may be the most powerful man in the world, but Ritsa can see that he's "a lethal mixture of arrogance and insecurity." The men "lack the basic empathy to imagine what it's like to have no say in what's done to your body." Some of the women are so traumatized and starved that they've stopped having their periods.
The tenor of Ritsa's narration constantly scrapes away the patina of epic glory and forces us, with her humor and her candor, to consider the lived experience of these people who caused and endured constant tides of violence and degradation.
"Had I really sunk so low?" Ritsa asks. "Yes - the only possible answer. I was Cassandra's catch-fart - well, be honest, would you want that on your headstone? No, me neither. Not that I was likely to get one - a headstone, I mean - or even a grave."
Clearly, we're not reverently marching through a Robert Fagels translation.
The first part of the novel takes place in the fetid confines of Agamemnon's ship, which gives Barker time to pull tight the strains among these returning warriors and their enslaved victims. When they make land, Ritsa's chapters are interlaced with chapters in the third person that thrust us into Clytemnestra's plot to murder her husband. As the anti-Penelope, Clytemnestra is deeply sympathetic - and terrifying. She's evolved into a spider of vengeance who's spun her grief and guilt into a web of vindication.
With a subtle cinematic touch, Barker renders Agamemnon's gloomy palace even more claustrophobic than his ship: The halls seem haunted by the angry ghosts of children who leave their red handprints on the walls. Just outside the realm of comprehension, everybody hears the singing - the faint, malicious nursery rhymes - but nobody mentions this perfect and perfectly creepy manifestation of the crimes that have been committed in the house of Atreus.
But still, Barker's most effective effort to pry beneath the shiny surface of the epic and etch this story on our minds anew comes in Clytemnestra's sudden, fragmented recollections - "the flashes that have plagued her day and night for the last 10 years." There's the memory of Iphigenia shouting "Daddy" and wetting herself as he raised the knife. Or the drop of Iphigenia's blood that Clytemnestra realizes is just a ladybug, whose ordinary presence amid the dead girl's mangled body feels impossibly obscene.
The gods have set down their inalterable decrees, and Aeschylus has spilled all the spoilers, but Barker still manages to make these bloody stories moan with dread and snap with surprise. The slaughter that Cassandra foresees and legends have retold for millennia splashes across these pages in all its shocking, slick gore.
In the stunned silence at the end of "The Voyage Home," I remembered a scene early in the novel when Cassandra and Ritsa were on Agamemnon's ship, called the Medusa. Cassandra leans far out to touch the figurehead of the snake-haired creature.
The ship's doctor remarks: "Isn't it an odd choice for a figurehead? A Monster?"
"Was she a monster?" Cassandra asks.
"She turned every living thing she ever met to stone," the doctor says. "I'd call that a monster, wouldn't you?"
"But isn't that the point?" Cassandra asks. "Who decides who's a monster?"
The doctor replies, "The winner."
With "The Voyage Home," Barker has staged a rematch. The score may stay the same, but winning isn't everything.
- - -
The Voyage Home
By Pat Barker
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
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Charles, Ron. "'The Voyage Home' gives new blood to an ancient tale." Washington Post, 3 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818816634/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c82f3445. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Voyage Home
Pat Barker. Doubleday, $29 (288p) ISBN 978-0-385-54911-0
Barker (The Silence of the Girls) recounts the aftermath of the Trojan War in this tense third entry in her Women of Troy series. With the city in ruins, victorious King Agamemnon and his Greek army sail home to Mycenae. On the ship, King Priam’s daughter Cassandra, once a virgin priestess and now a concubine, endures Agamemnon’s abuse. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophesy but made sure no one would believe her. Now, on approach to Agamemnon’s royal palace, she foresees two dead bodies in the courtyard: hers and the king’s. Agamemnon also has a troubled mind—he sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to assure victory at Troy, and now he sees her ghost on the ship. Meanwhile, at the palace, Queen Clytemnestra plots to murder Agamemnon for killing Iphigenia. But the queen has her own enemies—her son Orestes and daughter Electra. The narrator, Ritsa, is another beleaguered woman. A Trojan survivor enslaved by Cassandra, she’s resigned to a life of subjugation. Barker suffuses the wrenching narrative with the women’s simmering contempt for the men who rule their world. Readers will relish this fierce feminist retelling. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Dec.)