The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Posted in Fantasy, Other fiction at 12:00 on 2 July 2025
Hamish Hamilton, 2024, 292 p.
This is the third in Barker’s Troy series. Unlike the first two, which were narrated by Briseis (the former princess of Lyrnessus, a town sacked by the Greeks before they ventured on to its ally Troy, with Briseis being given to Achilles as a prize of war,) this novel’s main narrator is Ritsa, a friend of Briseis, but now a possession of Machaon, physician to Mycenean King Agamemnon, and body-slave (or, as she puts it, catch-fart) to Troy’s Princess, Cassandra, herself Agamemnon’s bed-slave, though they had gone through a form of marriage.
Cassandra is famed for her gift of prophecy; a gift bestowed on her by the God Apollo, whose priestess she was, but also cursed by him never to be believed since she refused his advances.
Ritsa’s tale is narrated in first person past tense but some chapters of the book are in the third person present tense from the viewpoints either of Cassandra or of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. This is useful authorially as of course Ritsa cannot have access to scenes where she is not present.
The book’s title is, of course, ironic. The home they journey to was never that of the Trojan women; only of the Greeks who took them captive. It is also slightly inappropriate in that the sea voyage to Mycenae is over before the book is even halfway through – though less so in the sense that by the novel’s end Cassandra’s journey home is utterly complete.
Some of the prose and dialogue is in a modern register which might jar with the ambience of myth which Barker is dealing with. But in looking at these events/stories with a modern eye (Barker’s controlled indignation, even rage, at the treatment of women in these tales, while not getting in the way of the story she tells, is never far away) an up-to-date treatment is absolutely appropriate. There is also some inter-sexual politics at play when Ritsa notes that, “She” (Cassandra) “was speaking in a Daddy’s-little-girl voice, the kind that some men find mysteriously attractive and makes every woman within earshot want to slap you.”
Ritsa bitterly contemplates Cassandra’s question about a description of the ship’s figurehead Medusa (another misrepresented woman?) as a monster, “Who decides who the monster is?” and Machaon’s reply, “The winner.”
Medusa did not win, and neither has Ritsa, whose monsters lie in front of her: the Greeks who have the temerity to call Trojans barbarian, while themselves being the purveyors of savagery. Only the Medusa’s captain, Andreas, treats her as worthy of respect. (Or is that only because he has always fancied her?)
Agamemnon is prime monster, even if he is haunted by visions of his daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed to the gods to secure fair winds for the voyage to Troy. (His palace in Mycenae is also haunted: by the hand and foot prints of his cousins, killed by his father, Atreus, and their bodies fed by him to theirs, Thyestes, with their feet and hands shown to Thyestes to prove he had eaten them. Greek myth is a horrifically bloody edifice.)
But the heart of this story doesn’t lie with either Cassandra or Ritsa; nor Agamemnon. This is Clytemnestra’s time of reckoning. Ten years ruling in Agamemnon’s stead – and ruling well – only to be ignored the moment he returns; ten years worshipping her dead daughter, erecting a temple in her honour which no-one arriving by sea could avoid seeing; ten years devising a calculated, elaborate revenge for Iphigenia’s death. A dish served cold, with relish.
But every action has its conseqences. Revenge begets revenge. Clytemnestra’s remaining children, Electra and Orestes, will be sure to avenge their father.
Not that Ritsa will be around to see that. Barker instead contrives a more hopeful fate for her.
Pedant’s corner:- Three sentences of Ritsa’s narration are for some reason given in the present tense. “Achilles’ child” (Achilles’s; most names ending in s were given only s’ rather than s’s when possessives, Aegisthus’, Andreas’, Orestes’, Iras’, Briseis’, etc,) “more like, a bowl of barley porridge” (doesn’t need that comma,) “that some men find mysteriously attractive” (ought to be ‘that some men mysteriously find attractive’,) had never showed” (had never shown.) “The guard come toward us” (The guard came towards us.)
Tags: Fantasy, Literary Fiction, myth, Pat Barker, The Voyage Home, Troy