The Voyage Home: Powerful, in a quieter fashion

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

Amongst the flood of Greek myth retellings over the past number few years, three authors have stood out to me. Two are Madeline Miller and Claire North, the first for her fantastic Circe (not to mention the brilliant The Song of Achilles from a decade earlier) and the second for her excellent and just-concluded SONGS OF PENELOPE trilogy. The third is Pat Barker and her WOMEN OF TROY series, which began with The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy and now moves on to The Voyage Home. Like the others, Barker’s work filters the Greek tales through a feminist viewpoint, giving moving, passionate voice to the all-too often voiceless while also stripping the stories of much of their elevated, epic nature, refusing to look away from the ugliness at their core.

The first two novels were told through the eyes of Briseis, a former Trojan queen relegated to war prize of Achilles. Book one was set during the war, book two at the fall of Troy. Now, in The Voyage Home, Barker switches POV and setting, leaving the beach of Ilium behind for the islands of Greece, as Briseis’ best friend, the young slave healer Rita, accompanies her mistress Cassandra, claimed by the Greek leader Agamemnon, on the sea voyage to Agamemnon’s home of Mycenae. Cassandra, cursed by Apollo to foretell the future but have no one believe her, takes ship knowing she sails to her and Agamemnon’s death. Meanwhile, back in Mycenae, we also get a third-person POV focused on Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, who has spent the past decade increasingly furious and bitter over Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Now, wandering the palace haunted by the dead children who were killed and served up as dinner to begin the Atreus curse (and representative as well of all children who suffer at the hands of men, like those Agamemnon had thrown down from the walls of Troy), she plans her revenge on her husband.

This is a world far removed from the grandeur of myth, as we see nearly immediately, when Rita recalls how Cassandra had arrived “clothes ripped, skirt bloodied, and standing with semen.” Or when she calls herself “Cassandra’s catch-fart.” It’s a world with a rapist’s “cum tightening on her thigh,” where bodies are marked by “sagging tits and stretch-marked belly” and beard hairs are plucked from the mouth after sex, where “fuck sweat [is] clammy on the skin” and healers “work miracles with … piles.” We’re far removed from the “fleet-footed”, “white-armed” “silver bowed” characters of the epics. Barker, as she did with her modern war trilogy, shows us the brutality of this world without the soft gel filter of poetic language.

In fact, it is telling that Barker reserves much of the poetry for moments such as Clytemnestra’s flashes of imagery that have haunted her ever since her daughter’s being sacrificed “like a heifer”, recalling how:

Iphigenia’s head cradled in her arms … she’s [Clytemnestra] staring blankly at a clump of green plants … when she notices a patch of red on one of the leaves. At first, she thinks it’s blood . . . but then she sees it’s a ladybird, doing nothing in particular, simply being there. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, you children are gone. Words breaking the surface of a mind which, without them, would have been as empty as the sky.

Clytemnestra is here a mother first and foremost. She has been grieving her daughter’s murder for ten years — “once she was the mother of Iphigenia — and she still is. Not even death can change that.” But, after a long period of inconsolable mourning, she also tries to take heed for her other children, Electra and Orestes, knowing her path will send them down a hard road. She will not be distracted from her role as mother, does not muddy the waters with an affair with Aegisthus, as in the story. She is not interested in him for sex, or as a man, but only as a tool. And not to help her kill Agamemnon either. When Aegisthus tells her he should do it because he’s a man, she warns him he underestimates her. He is not a co-conspirator really, just a means to help her keep her kingdom running, but she knows he’s a tool she’ll have to discard soon to protect her son. She will not be distracted by sex. Will not be distracted by this war bride Agamemnon brings home. By her bitter knowledge that Agamemnon also loved Iphigenia. Not even by the ghosts that haunt her palace, leaving bloody footprints and handprints and whispering horrid little songs of death. Clever, fierce, and implacable, Clytemnestra, like Cassandra, has set herself upon a road and will not stray from it.

And between them is Rita. Survivor of the conquest of Troy. Survivor of rape at the hands of her Greek owner and healer-mentor, a man who truly cares about people, who refused to let her be mistreated, and her rapist. So at this point, on the crossing, she is a survivor. But this is one of the few plot tensions in the book in terms of “what happens next”, as we know what does in fact happen to Cassandara, to Agamemnon, to Clytemnestra (and even beyond to Electra and Orestes), so I will not spoil this plot point for you.

If there is little tension in terms of “will Cassandra in fact die” or “Will Clytemnestra really kill her husband,” that’s not to say there’s no tension at all. The book seethes with it, as in-one on-one scenes between Cassandra and Rita or between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon when they finally do meet but not yet at the pivotal moment. Between Clytemnestra and Cassandra, two strong-willed, stubborn women who have much in common. Sometimes the tension is internal, as characters debate with themselves over courses of action. When Clytemnestra recalls Iphigenia’s murder or when Agamemnon (remember, he loved her too) sees her ghost. Or sometimes the tension arises from the one supernatural element in the novel, those strange ghost children that leaves their handprints behind or taunt with songs about beheading. The book then is masterfully tense in its small moments rather than the big narrative “will they or won’t” they arc.

Beyond the themes of violence and suffering, particularly of women and children at the hands of men, Barker also casts an eye on storytelling itself. Indirectly, of course, the gritty realism and giving voice to the voiceless (a concept given overt mention when an old Trojan woman sings a “lament, but stoical rather than self-pitying [giving] a voice to those hundreds of silent women.”) its own criticism of the tales we tell. But there is also, as Machaon, Rita’s owner, tells her, how “they say [Iphigenia] went to her death willingly … It’s not true. She fought them every step of the way. They had to gag her in the end, they were so frightened she’d curse him with her last breath.” Or how the story of Medusa is told, a topic that comes up thanks to her visage being the figurehead on the boat taking them to Mycenae. When Machaon says “a monster” is an “odd choice for a figurehead,” Cassandra asks, “Was she a monster … Who decides who’s a monster?” Machaon’s answer is succinct and, in Rita’s eyes, evinces a “brutal cynicism”: “The winner.” It’s not surprise either that in these two examples, the stories both involve a man killing a woman (or a girl) for their own ends rather than in self-defense. I’d say it’s also a nicely biting symmetry that in one such story the men fear the girl’s voice (thus the gagging) and in the other they fear the women’s gaze (the gorgon’s power). Those kind of subtle craft points, the ones where a moment lands, then, a moment or more later, lands again even harder, are one of the reasons Barker, along with the two other authors mentioned in the intro, stand out amidst all these retellings of Greek myth.

The Voyage Home doesn’t quite have the out and out power of the first two books, and its impact is probably somewhat diluted by the distancing of having Rita as a focus, more an outsider in some ways amongst the stratagems of the powerful and in comparison to their larger-than-life personalities and backstories. But it is powerful in a quieter fashion, and I’d say for a trilogy that seeks in many ways to de-glorify the epics, having it close with a slave’s narration is a more than fitting choice. Though given just how good this series has been, I for one wouldn’t mind if it just closes this phase, and Barker returns with a fourth book focusing on Electra. Strongly recommended.