Penguin, 2013, 269 p.

I realised at the end of this after seeing the publisher’s blurb at the back that this is a sequel (of sorts) to a previous Barker novel, Life Class, which features some of the same characters.

The main focus here is on Elinor Brooke, who in childhood formed a very close relationship with her brother Toby, on his part chiefly because she was a kind of replacement for his dead twin. In 1912, Elinor gets a place at The Slade Art School and while studying there she meets Kit Neville and Paul Tarrant who will both be important to the novel’s plot.

The Great War is the pivot of the story (as it was for all of those who matured in time for its trajectory to direct their lives.) Toby, Kit and Paul all join up and Elinor sends time worrying about them all – but especially Toby, even though in its early stages she and Paul had become lovers. His enlistment put a wedge between them, though, and their communications become sparse.

Most of the tale is seen from Elinor’s viewpoint, including various of her diary entries, but increasingly scenes begin to relate more of Paul’s experiences.

Elinor’s fears are confirmed when the telegram arrives with the news that Toby is “Missing. Believed Killed.” The parcel containing Toby’s effects, smelling as it does of the stench of the trenches, is an added trauma. Her parents withdraw into themselves and Elinor begins to fixate on whether Toby is really dead and if so how it happened. She moves into Toby’s room (thus giving Barker her title: and a metaphor for Elinor’s retreat into denial.)

When Paul is wounded Elinor is reluctant to visit but as she wants him to contact Kit, who was in Toby’s regiment, she eventually does so. Kit himself suffers a horrific facial wound and is sent to a surgical hospital for treatment. When Elinor visits him he refuses to give any detail about Toby’s death but while there she encounters her old art tutor Professor Tonks who enlists her to help draw the progression of facial reconstructions as successive surgeries take place on the patients.

Barker has of course previously examined the Great War in her “Regeneration” trilogy. Her writing is immersive and her knowledge of the time lends this tale a great wealth of incidental detail. Another Slade contemporary, Catherine, has German ancestry. She and her family suffer the ostracism enemy aliens – even those born in the UK – were subjected to at the time. The horrors and exigencies of life in the trenches are shown matter-of-factly but unflinchingly. The psychology of it all is convincing enough and Kit’s memories of Toby as eventually related to Paul reveal him to be somewhat different from Elinor’s impression of him, not treating the men as kindly as he should have, a foreshadowing of the revelation about the way in which Toby died.

This is vintage Barker. She rarely disappoints.

Pedant’s corner:- “the whole place must have shook” (must have shaken.) “Somewhere near by” (Somewhere nearby,) “that’s one less to worry about” (one fewer,) putties (puttees – used later,) “a cluster of white-coated doctors and nurses were supervising the unloading of the wounded” (a cluster … was supervising,) “coming up the steep lane that lead from the Embankment” (that led from,) “oblivious of the city” (oblivious to the city.)

Hamish Hamilton, 2003, 314 p

Artist Kate Frobisher, whose war photographer husband, Ben, was not long ago shot in Afghanistan, is driving home one winter’s night when her car skids on black ice and comes off the road. Her injuries mean she will need help to complete the commission of a sculpture of Jesus for the local church. The vicar suggests Peter Wingrave, a handyman currently unemployed. Meanwhile foreign correspondent Stephen Sharkey, Ben’s colleague, has split up with his wife and comes to live in a cottage owned by his brother in the same village.

The set-up reminded me a bit of J L Carr’s A Month in the Country, which featured an incomer haunted by war experiences (in his case The Great War) uncovering a mural in a rural church. Barker’s book is longer, though, and a trifle more complicated.

Wingrave turns out to have a peculiar interest in the sculpture and a past which includes something dark plus a relationship with the vicar’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Justine. Stephen and Justine, who is having a pre-University gap year enforced by illness and looks after his autistic nephew when the parents are at work, soon start seeing each other despite their age difference.

Stephen is haunted by his memories – especially that of a dead woman in Sarajevo – yet he is intent on writing a book about them using Ben’s photographs as illustrations. He reflects on the responsibility of being a witness, “There’s always this tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being sceptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be,” a tension which the artist Goya also felt. Goya, he knows, “visited circuses, fiestas, fairs, freak shows, street markets, acrobatic displays, lunatic asylums, bear fights, public executions, any spectacle strong enough to still the shouting of the demons in his ears.”

The background of the aftermath of the foot and mouth epidemic is well drawn but despite seeming foreshadowings like that, events do not take the course they would normally imply. Barker handles her characters well enough, these people feel individual (even if the affair between Stephen and Justine is problematic. Is taking up with a much younger woman really a suitable salve for a troubled mind?) The connections between the lives of the protagonists of the two main strands, Kate and Stephen, are not really present, though. Only Wingrave provides any overlap between them, and that is tangential – not to mention a little forced what with his being Justine’s former lover.

Pedant’s corner:- “iced-covered” (‘iced-over’ or ‘ice-covered’ not ‘iced-covered’,) a north-east of England local refers to ‘the haar’ being what a ‘cartload of southern poofs’ would call a sea-fret (haar is in fact the word used in Scotland – especially east Scotland – for that meteorological phenomenon.)

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.)

Hamish Hamilton, 2018, 331 p.

The epigraph quotes a character from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain about the urtext of Western literature. “All of European literature springs from a fight.” And what is the quarrel about? “A woman. A girl really.”

That woman, that girl, is not Helen, proximate cause of the Trojan War as she was. Instead, the object of the fight and so that well-spring of Western letters is Briseis, narrator of this novel (most of it anyway,) torn from the life and comfort she knew as wife to Mynes, king of Lyrnessus, to a reduced existence as slave to Achilles and the unwitting pivot on which the outcome of the Trojan War hinged. This novel is an attempt by Barker to retrieve the memory and experience not just of Briseis, who, after all, like Achilles, Hector, Ajax et al, may be no more than a myth, but of all the women whom myth and history have traditionally made incidental.

The novel is made up of Briseis’s recollections and thoughts with occasional interpolations as if from a reader asking her questions. There are some sections which initially seem like missteps on the author’s part when we shift to a third person focus on Achilles at times when Briseis is not present to observe him but they are there to nudge us in the direction of whose story this really is.

The book starts with Briseis and the women of Lyrnessus waiting for their city to fall to the Greeks, the great war cry of Achilles ringing in their ears. They know what is to come, their men and boys killed, visibly pregnant women speared in the belly on the off-chance they are carrying a son, their futures cut off, any semblance of autonomy erased, taken over as chattels at best and in any case degraded to sexual playthings.

Possibly to bring myth down to Earth Barker occasionally deploys anachronisms. The Greek soldiers sing rugby songs around their tables. When the captured women are paraded before them Briseis hears one of them say, “‘Look at the knockers on that.’” Achilles greets his award of Briseis with the words, “‘Cheers, lads. She’ll do.’” From then her life becomes one of service, and she a thing, not a person; a drudge and object of sexual release. Her only solace is to immerse herself in the sea every evening but she finds the smell of seaweed on her skin and hair arouses Achilles. (His mother was a sea-goddess after all.) There and back, she wanders through the Greek camp in all its rat-infested squalor.

Though Briseis doubts the efficacy of prayers she nevertheless implores Apollo to bring down pestilence on the camp. Whether this is an attempt by Barker to give Briseis some agency is left open but one day a priest of Apollo arrives to plead for the release of his daughter, Chryseis, now Agamemnon’s slave. He refuses. A subsequent outbreak of plague in the camp leads the superstitious sodiers to believe it is Apollo’s revenge for his refusal and Achilles is forced to demand Agamemnon give Chryseis up. He will do so only if Achilles yields Briseis to him. This is the source of their quarrel. An enraged Achilles says to his closest friend Patroclus, “He hasn’t earnt it.” Briseis focuses on that one word: “it. It doesn’t belong to him, he hasn’t earnt it.” Achilles is talking about the honour he’d gained by fighting but she experiences the phrase as being about her. And of course it was. She was the embodiment of that ‘honour’, its symbol, a prize – however unwilling – won for being able to kill people. Achilles cries as she is taken away – but it isn’t for her.

Briseis frequently reflects on the lot of women. “There was a legend – it tells you everything really – that whenever Helen cut a thread in her weaving, a man died on the battlefield. She was responsible for every death.” A slave called Tecmessa relays to Briseis what Ajax said to her when he won’t speak about what’s causing his recurring nightmare, “Silence becomes a woman,” and Briseis tells us, “Every woman I’d ever known was brought up on that saying.” A few days after Achilles kills Hector on the battlefield, the Trojan King, Priam, secretly makes his way into the Greek camp to plead for his son’s body for burial. Kneeling before Achilles he says, “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Briseis can only think, “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.” She realises though that Trojan songs and stories would survive since their Greek sons would remember what their Trojan mothers had sung to them. (Curiously daughters are not mentioned here, yet they would surely also pass on those tales and songs.)

For this story, however, the pull of myth is too powerful, the legend of Achilles too strong, “make no mistake, this was his story, his anger, his grief, his story…. I was still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no real part to play in it.”

As for posterity, “They won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No. They’ll go for something altogether softer.”

This is not a book I’m likely to forget.

Aside: I suppose this is all moot if we’re dealing with myth but I have mentioned before the problems I have with the concept of a ten year long siege of a Bronze Age city. Here they are compounded by the fact that the men go off to fight during the day – seemingly with mayhem occurring, certainly lots of bloodshed (so where do the reinforcements come from?) – leaving a few behind to guard the ships. But the soldiers return to their huts in the evening to eat, to drink, to argue and to do the other things soldiers do. The text does imply the use of sentries but no consideration seems to be given to the possibility of a concerted night attack.

Pedant’s corner:- Time interval/within minutes count: at least ten. Otherwise; Mynes’ (Mynes’s; all names ending in ‘s’ – Patroclus, Achilles, Odysseus, Chryseus, Alcimus, Peleus etc, have their possessives rendered as s’ rather than s’s,) “around out feet” (our feet,) ceasefire (x2. It’s an odd word to describe an agreed temporary interruption to a war in the Bronze Age, carried out in the main by hand-to-hand combat, ‘truce’ would have jarred less.) “The sound rose to a crescendo” (no it didn’t; it rose – crescendoed – to a climax.)

And so, back to the beginning of Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times, which started with Judith at Reader in the Wilderness but is now hosted by Katrina at Pining for the West.

These books sit on the very top of that bookcase I featured in the first of these posts, above the shelves that contain all my (read) Scottish books.

They’re here because they fit into the space – at least in the case of the three “What If…” books, What If?, More What If? and What If America? – anthologies of Altered History stories – and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Then there is Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Colin Greenland’s excellent Finding Helen, a Paul Torday, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Marina Lewycka’s A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian, non-SF works by SF writers Brian Aldiss and Norman Spinrad, Robert Standish’s Elephant Walk and three books by Erich Maria Remarque including the incomparable All Quiet on the Western Front.

If I were filing my books thoroughly systematically these would all have to be moved.

Virago, 1986, 286 p. (This novel is also known as Liza’s England.)

Stephen is a social worker, troubled by the youths down at what passes for the local centre, and also by his parents who are uncomfortable with (or in his mother’s case unaware of) his homosexuality. He is assigned to Liza Jarrett, an old woman living with a parrott called Nelson (whom she inherited from a pub landlord when the pub closed down) in a terraced house scheduled for demolition but which she is unwilling to give up. Liza was born on the stroke of midnight at 1899’s turn into 1900 and dubbed ‘Daughter of the Century’ by the local newspaper, a clipping of which her father was very proud. This made her one of that generation who lost brothers in one war and sons in the next. The novel is, though, more a tale of female resilience in and around that century’s defining landmarks (which it deals with only tangentially, even if their repercussions impact mightily on Liza’s life.) It intersperses Liza’s memories with Stephen’s experiences in the present as he comes to appreciate her and her determination to make the best of things, to fend for herself, to depend on nobody, and, with its present being the 1980s, illuminates the passing of a sense of community, of worth, “‘that’s where it all went wrong you know. It was all money. You’d’ve thought we had nowt else to offer. But we did. We had a way of life, a way of treating people.’”

There is some ground here to which Barker would return in her Regeneration trilogy (in particular the Great War and its munitions workers known as canaries.) While it tends to the bleak there are some moments of wry humour. At Stephen’s dad’s funeral, “‘It’s like a wedding in there,’ Stephen said. ‘No it isn’t,’ said Christine. Weddings aren’t that cheerful.’”

This was Barker’s third novel and while the characterisation is good her writing had not quite yet attained the maturity it would display later. The story is engaging though and Liza’s life reflects the stoicism of the women of her generation and class not often exhibited in fiction with the novel overall a threnody for a lost solidarity.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) wrack and ruin (OK, it’s a legitimate alternative but to me wrack is a seaweed, so, rack and ruin), minaly (mainly,) “from his dying from his dying body” (only one ‘from his dying’ needed.) “Most of the crowd were young” (Most of the crowd was young.)