The Voyage Home

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Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, The Voyage Home centres on the fate of Cassandra – daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be believed. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.) Readers turn to Barker's novels for their plain truths and clear-eyed sense of our history and creation stories. But the sombre clarity of her writing is offset by a luminous wisdom' Sunday Times A powerfully thought-provoking portrait of modern warfare from one of the modern masters of war fiction

Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over. Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. It is grim. The words “filthy” and “stained” recur. Even the sea is foul, yellowish-grey and full of dead things. War is dirty and ugly and smelly and Barker never lets us forget it. Men may set out in the morning oiled and glorious as Phoebus Apollo, their chariots glittering, but at nightfall “ash-grey men driving dirty horses would emerge from the clouds of dust”. Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history. Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human' Herald Published in 2018, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was a rewriting of the plot of the Iliad from the point of view of a captive queen, Briseis, over whose possession Agamemnon and Achilles fell out. It wasn’t an easy task Barker had set herself. Achilles – terrifying, charismatic and doomed to an early death – is hard to sideline. Through Briseis’s clear eyes the Greek base, peopled by fighting men and captive women, was revealed to be a “rape camp”. But, as Briseis herself remarks, “A song isn’t new merely because a woman’s voice is singing it.” The story remained, stubbornly, one mainly about men. In this sequel, though, Barker has stepped free of the masculinist epic tradition. Briseis is still the narrator, but Barker has left the Iliad behind, with its insistence on the glory and the pathos of warfare. The Women of Troy draws mainly on a very different source – Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women. This is a story not of conflict but of its aftermath. When a person is turned into a literal commodity, she risks becoming as near to nothingness as a chewed bone

Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, The Voyage Home centres on the fate of Cassandra - daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be believed. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.) London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men - pacifists, objectors, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before - army psychiatrist William Rivers - Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be. The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it. The third book in her acclaimed series reimagining the Iliad story from the perspective of the Trojan women, which began with The Silence of the Girls.Clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak.