An absolutely brilliant finale to the Trojan War series by Pat Barker - The Silence of the Girls and the Women of Troy. It has the same down to earth grittiness that truly conveys the awfulness of the plight of Greek and Trojan women during and after the battle. We pick up at the end of the war when Cassandra and her maid are being taken as captives back to Greece. Pat Barker brings to life the utter hopelessness and despair of these women and the lack of control they have over their lives but also depicts the choices they can still make when opportunity and chance present themselves. For Cassandra that is to decide if she wants to follow the path she foresaw which leads to her death and that of King Agamemnon or risk choosing life and seeing him escape his destiny. For his queen, her choice is whether to avenge her daughter's murder at his hands knowing it will unleash another cycle of destruction and for Ritsa, Cassandra's maid, it is about whether to seize the chance for freedom in the wake of his murder.
This is one of the very best retellings of the Trojan War and I hope the author writes more!

The final instalment (I'm guessing) in Barker's Trojan trilogy and this takes us back to Greece and into the cursed palace of Agamemnon in Mycenae where the Furies or Eumenides are waiting to renew the cycle of bloodthirsty revenge.

The story is split between a first person narrative of the enslaved Ritsa, body woman to Cassandra, and a third person narrative from the perspective of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife and mother of the sacrificed Iphigenia. Again, Barker inhabits these women with imaginative force taking us from the grieving Trojan women being shipped en masse to Greece to the brooding Clytemnestra who has waited ten long years for the return of her husband.

There are always choices to be made when telling a story where we know the milestones and the endpoint and Barker offers a female perspective on the myths that are especially known to us from [book:The Trojan Women|1468] and [book:Andromache|1468] by Euripides and the [book:Agamemnon|1519], the first play from Aeschylus' [book:Oresteia|1519] cycle. All these dramas foreground female characters but whose voices are ventriloquised by male authors creating them in a culture which uses 'female' voices to express emotions of grief, lament and loss that may be less accessible to masculine voices. Barker fills out some of these views with, especially, a modern and feminist concern for the way women may be used as pawns on the battlefield and the sense of helplessness as they are routinely raped and enslaved as the victims and spoils of war.

Nevertheless, Barker also gives us a trio of women leads who struggle to achieve some agency: Cassandra, the prophetess and daughter of Troy, Clytemnestra, and Ritsa, a created character who carves out a fate as a common woman amidst the mythic. As in the previous volumes, this straddles the past and present using modern vernacular and contemporary modes of thinking to re-access these ancient stories. There's also a scepticism here about the 'mythic': Ritsa doesn't want to believe that Cassandra has powers of prophecy from Apollo and plays down the idea of the gods as excuses for human behaviour.

As in the second volume, there are places where the pace could be tightened up. But what stands out especially for me is the superb evocation of the bloody house of Atreus, both conceptually and as a material location. This Mycenean palace is, literally, haunted by its ghosts creating a claustrophobic atmosphere than is tangible. Playing on what we already know must happen - as if we too are Cassandras - this ends at a moment of crisis.

A fitting ending to a creative re-working of the Trojan stories for a modern audience.