Book Review: The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
My feelings on the British anti-war novelist's latest re-imagining of a tale based on Greek mythology.
I’ve had quite the tumultuous relationship with the book review service NetGalley over the past six months. In a way, this was not necessarily a bad thing; at the outset of my signing up, most of the books I applied to review were automatically accepted, and most of these I was happy to give positive feedback on. The surplus of material I’ve had access to that I’ve had an obligation to review has created somewhat of a glut on this blog that I would have otherwise preferred to avoid, however; there are a handful of outstanding old novels I’ve written about (as well as promised video game reviews) that I’ve had to put off because of this obligation. Luckily for me, I’ve been saving this release as the best for last: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was an early feature on this section of my newsletter before I’d had a real understanding of how I wanted to approach book reviews. When I saw it listed as a possibility for future review, I of course jumped at the opportunity.
One last caveat: this novel is the third entry in a trilogy that began with The Silence of the Girls. That being said, I still have kept my promise to avoid talking about sequels without reviewing the series in sequence. I cannot say for certain whether the decision to group these together into a series was the author’s idea or a clever marketing ploy, but the novels share thematic and contextual links, rather than existing on the same timeline of a character’s life. In the same sense that Sergio Leone’s Dollars movies are a trilogy or Mary Renault’s novels are a series, this is a trilogy. Readers will be able to enjoy these stories in any order they decide to tackle them. In this case (as well as in the last entry,) the narrator was invented by the author to serve a function of telling a story from a perspective that has been explored, but not at a depth that it could otherwise be. Looking back it seems that Briseis’ existence in the original Iliad was a convenience to Barker, and that she otherwise would have gladly written a story about the period without those scant lines in the poem.
As it tends to go with these feminist retellings, the endings ought not come as a shock to any well-read readers. Fans of Aeschylus know exactly how Agamemnon’s journey back from Troy will end, and Cassandra’s fate is inextricably tied to his as well. Barker’s portrayal of Cassandra here would not work if she were the mad prophetess of legend, which I tend to prefer, but her curse of alienation from Apollo comes through in other avenues of her characterization. Most other authors (not to mention scholars) emphasize her role as a priestess, for instance, over her birthright as a princess. Barker spends a significant portion of the narrative correcting this imbalance; in addition to the standard ostracism from her peers inherent to the curse, Cassandra suffers from a fall in status as well. This is a bit of an anachronism; at the time, victors treated women as spoils of war, i.e. objects. Having a princess would have been treated as a special honor above any other commoner woman in that territory, and the standard hierarchy would have been observed among prisoners under most circumstances. It would have been in the interest of the ruling classes, whether they won or lost their wars, to maintain the perception that some were born with a god-given right to rule, after all.
Of course, if this fact of history were to be upheld, the broader themes of a loss of social status could no longer be explored. Generally speaking, I don’t mind a touch of inaccuracy in novels about the ancient world if there’s enough artistic merit to cover the spread, so to speak. This book’s prose is very good, and surpasses this requirement in my mind, if only just. The modern reader already harbors many misconceptions about the inner workings of the social hierarchy of the ancient world (just look at how the terminally online have butchered the term “plebeian”), and perpetuating a myth of ancient social mobility should generally be frowned upon. Barker’s interest isn’t actually talking about this phenomenon in the ancient world, however; it’s clear that these passages act as a metaphor for modern times.
This book is a solid one star on my scale. Knowing about Pat Barker’s history writing anti-war novels and about the themes of trauma and survival, it was interesting to have read this immediately after Daughters of Bronze by A.D. Rhine. Had I read this novel before that one, I may have chosen to forego finishing it a quarter of the way through. Barker’s condemnation of war is much stronger and a lot more in line with my beliefs, and though it was still interesting to read the prior book to get that perspective, I don’t value it all that highly. I’m almost tempted to bump it up another place because of this comparison in proximity, but if I’m being honest with myself, it remains at One Star.
