The Voyage Home by Pat Barker review – a gritty Greek game of thrones

The inconclusiveness of Pat Barker’s previous novel, The Women of Troy (2021) – a sequel to 2018’s The Silence of the Girls – left the impression that it might become the middle of a trilogy, not least because she already had two previous wartime trilogies under her belt. But to judge from The Voyage Home , the third instalment in Barker’s retelling of Greek war myths through the eyes of their conquered women, she may be eyeing an even longer project. Where earlier volumes drew on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid , here we turn to the domestic bloodletting recounted in the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia , so plentiful in drama that Barker’s heroine in her earlier two books, the enslaved Trojan queen Briseis, doesn’t even get a look-in.

Abruptly sidelining a major player worked well for The Wire , and that kind of box-set breadth seems to be what Barker is after in The Voyage Home , with characters and themes low or high in the mix as best suits. This time, though, I’m not sure the camera is in quite the right place. The novel opens with Troy “fucking pulverised”, in the words of Greek king Agamemnon, preparing to sail home for his victory parade, which is set to be thoroughly rained on thanks to his wife, Clytemnestra – out to avenge the daughter he sacrificed to ensure the gods smiled on his war.

There’s an ever-present electricity in Barker’s knack for calling a spade a shit-crusted shovel by any means possible

With Briseis left on shore, we witness the Greeks’ bumpy crossing and even bumpier return through the eyes of one of their captives, Ritsa, a maid to Cassandra, whom Agamemnon has taken as yet another trophy wife (she’s the daughter of the slain Trojan king Priam). For clairvoyant Cassandra, her enslavement is just one more step towards the grisly doom she has already envisaged for her captor.

As in earlier instalments, Barker sets out to demystify the story. See the reply when Ritsa spots Cassandra crying and asks what’s wrong: “Nothing, it’s just I get so sore. You can pretend about everything else, but you can’t pretend about that. Not that he ever notices. Bit of spit, in he goes.” While the novel’s steady focus on characters without power supplies plenty of grim detail along these lines, the gravity of the narrative is tugging us all the while in the opposite direction, towards the dysfunctional royals at the book’s heart – most of all Agamemnon’s scheming wife, of whom we get occasional glimpses, making you wonder why we needed to be so far from the action in the first place.

That said, there’s an ever-present electricity in Barker’s knack for calling a spade a shit-crusted shovel by any means possible. Ritsa isn’t a maid but a “catch-fart”. Cassandra feels Agamemnon’s “fuck-sweat clammy on her skin... His cum’s tightening on her thigh.” Piss-wet bedsheets and menstrual cloths need rinsing; a hair gets post-coitally plucked from between someone’s teeth. People tell each other to “shift your arse” and “shurrup”, and someone laments Ritsa’s late husband in terms that hardly wax sentimental: “He worked miracles with my piles. That cream he give me shrank them right down.”
Where The Silence of the Girls plunged us into the drama of invasion, sparing the reader little regarding the brutality of conquest, The Women of Troy was more a character study, focused on Briseis’s emotions during her pregnancy from rape. The Voyage Home , tonally in between, mixes open-ended scene-making with blockbuster dialogue (“Too risky... there’s no time”) and dollops of Hollywood sadism: “Do you remember what Daddy’s sword does?... Why don’t you call for your daddy now?” Somehow, the two-speed pacing makes caring equally about both strands peculiarly tricky: after Agamemnon gets his just deserts in a hallucinatory scene of three-way voyeurism, the climax of Ritsa’s tale feels like it belongs in a different novel, centred on the unlikely solace she finds in the arms of an invader.

Still, I wouldn’t bet on the journey ending here – nor would I be shocked if, next time, Barker changes tack and goes fully Greek.

• The Voyage Home by Pat Barker is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply