The Women of Troy
Review of the novel by Pat Barker
Novelists, of course, can and should take liberties to fully develop their characters and advance their stories. Here and in her earlier work, The Silence of the Girls, Barker creates character and drama in the unexpressed wiggle room of legend. For instance, she has Briseis marry Alcimus while pregnant with Achilles’ son, and Pyrrhus forbid the burial of Priam. But in this novel Barker derives no benefit from the dissonant changes.
The Women of Troy often diverges from and contradicts traditional versions of the story. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies abound. The differences are disconcerting and annoying and add nothing.
— She presents Briseis, the captive slave girl of Achilles, as having been a friend of Hecuba and Andromache before the war and has Briseis identify herself as a Trojan. (p. 126 “I am a Trojan.”)
— Calchas, the priest who serves Agamemnon, is a Trojan according to Barker (p. 91 and 116). But legend had him as a Greek who presided over the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis before the war. (Barker even implies that Calchas and Hecuba may have been romantically involved in the past).
— Barker has Diomedes die in the Trojan War: “before Achilles intent on avenging Diomedes’s death, had returned to the fighting” (p. 121). She probably meant Patroclus, not Diomedes. But that is a whopper of a mistake. And later in her novel, Barker shows Diomedes very much alive competing in a chariot race after the war ends (p. 220).
— She has Agamemnon marry Cassandra at Troy (p. 186). But he is already married to Clytemnestra. And while a Greek could have many concubines, he could only have one wife at a time.
