A Son of the Rock

Hamish Hamilton, 2021, 311 p.

This is the sequel to The Silence of the Girls which dealt with the events leading up to the fall of Troy through the eyes of Briseis, a princess of Troy’s ally, Lyrnessus. She had been given to Achilles as a slave in reward for his part in the Greeks’ victory over her city. No familiarity with that first book is necessary as the major details, being relevant to the story line, are gone over again in this volume.

We start inside the Wooden Horse* where Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, is – almost literally -shitting himself, fearing discovery by the Trojans. This is the first time I can remember reading anywhere a consideration of the logistics of carrying through such a ruse de guerre as the horse. Very few other scenes are shown from his viewpoint though, as most of the narrative is provide by Briseis again, except for one or two sections from the point of view of Calchas, a priest of Athena born in Troy but who had been in Agamemnon’s entourage for years.

This means that, bar Pyrrhus’s killing of Priam, we do not get a first-hand account of the sacking of Troy; though Briseis is aware of the mayhem – all males killed, all pregnant females too on the off-chance their child is a boy – through the tales of the women who survived. War in the Bronze Age was brutal, as in any age.

Through meetings with those women of Troy – Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, even Helen herself though of course she was not Trojan – Briseis sees it all and remarks on the ironic relationship between those two prominent figures. “You couldn’t imagine a more feminine woman than Helen nor a more virile man than Achilles, and yet in every way that mattered, they were alike. It was always about them.” Many an imbroglio has been initiated by the actions of people like that.

All the characters, Greeks and former Trojans alike, are kept on the beach by a continuing unfavourable wind preventing the Greek ships from sailing back home. Something has clearly upset the Gods; whether the destruction of Troy itself, the violation of the Temple of Athena wherein Little Ajax raped Cassandra, a virgin priestess, or the refusal by Pyrrhus, in imitation of his father’s treatment of Hector’s body, to have Priam buried. The main plot in The Women of Troy deals with the resolution of this last situation. Its main theme though is the treatment of women, their endurance and (mostly) forbearance, their invisibility to men.

Menelaus had promised to kill Helen on sight or take her back to Greece for the women to stone her. But in the camp he kept her in the lap of what passed for luxury and there were stories of “Helen’s ecstatic cries.” Briseis reflects, “And there’d be plenty of ecstatic cries; Helen was no fool.” But. “The whole camp resented his taking her back. Greek fighters and Trojan slaves united in one thing and one thing only: hatred of Helen.” His slaves know what goes on, “‘All night,’ Hecuba tells Briseis. ‘What’s he trying to do? Fuck her to death?’” In a later meeting with Helen Briseis notices the bruises round Helen’s neck from Menelaus throttling her in the process.

Briseis has no illusions about men. She remarks on her husband Alcimus staying out all night. “Of course he had other women – all men do,” later saying even Trojan men did. Knowing of his imminent death Achilles had had her married to his best friend, confident Alcimus would look after her and the baby she carried. When Briseis asks him if he regrets the marriage he says, “I’m married to the second most beautiful woman in the world – how could I possibly regret that?” This despite him not taking her to his bed – at least not in the text – perhaps because she was carrying his friend’s child. Even so, second most is obviously not the most tactful thing to say to your wife. But people assumed Briseis loved Achilles. After all she’d had the fastest, strongest, bravest, most beautiful man of his generation in her bed. How could she not love him? Simple. “He killed my brothers. We women are peculiar creatures. We tend not to love those who murder our families.”

A certain bitterness, even resignation, is evidenced in Briseis observing that “Achilles’ story never ends: wherever men fight and die you’ll find Achilles,” and she quotes Cassandra (famously endowed with the gift of true prophecy but simultaneously cursed as not to be heeded) saying, “‘I’ve learned not to be too attached to my own prophecies. They’ve only ever been believed when I could get a man to deliver them.’”

Yet the focus, and perhaps unintended hero, of this tale is the dead Priam, a man too compassionate for his own good, whose unburied body means his spirit will be doomed to wander till the end of time. It is the all but insignificant Calchas who comes up with a solution to the problem even if Pyrrhus attempts to subvert it.

One small irritation was that Barker apparently felt the need to explain about laying coins (or, here, a piece of jewellery) on a dead person’s eyes to pay the ferryman. Surely anyone familiar with this era would know that classical allusion. However, that she manages to maintain momentum and interest in a story where its principal character, being both a Trojan and a woman, has little room for manœuvre is an admirable feat of story-telling even if that story’s bones have been available for authors to pick over for millennia. She has filled her novel – both her novels – with characters who ring utterly true, both to their times and to our knowledge of human nature.

(*I refuse to call the horse Trojan. It was built – and used – by the Greeks.)

Pedant’s corner:- The inside cover blurb says “the wind has vanished” (in the text it hasn’t, it is its continual blowing that keeps the Greeks on the beach,) Rufus’ (Rufus’s,) Achilles’ (Achilles’s,) Odysseus’ (Odysseus’s,) Lord Alcimus’ (Alcimus’s,) Lord Pyrrhus’ (Pyrrhus’s,) “are singing hymns of praise to Athena, guardian of cities, as they dragged the horse inside the gates” (as they drag,) “brought to this of Lyrnessus camp” (to this camp of Lyrnessus,) Calchus (elsewhere always ‘Calchas’.) “A big crowd, …., were watching”” (a big crowd …. was watching.)