At the House of Atreus

Reanimated female figures from classical mythology have become profusely voluble in recent fiction. From Helen to Hecuba, Medea to Medusa, Circe to Clytemnestra and Ariadne to Atalanta, they have attained belated audibility as central characters in numerous novels, returned to tell their side of the story.

Giving voice to the voiceless – the ignored or suppressed – has, of course, been a prominent concern in contemporary fiction, and from the start of her career Pat Barker has been at the forefront of this enterprise. Her first two novels, Union Street (1982) and Blow Your House Down (1984), aimed to make heard the world of working-class women in her native northeast England. With Regeneration (1991), which initiated her acclaimed trilogy about the First World War, Barker moved on to silence of another kind.

“All my interest in war comes from what is not said”, she once declared in The Times (July 1, 2007). Regeneration teems with instances of this. Among the “war neurosis” casualties in its setting, Craiglockhart, the Edinburgh hospital where officers invalided from the Western Front receive treatment, is a lieutenant stunned into dumbness by the unspeakable horrors he has witnessed, culminating in a shell attack that left him holding a man’s eyeball on the palm of his shaking hand. Psychosomatic stammering and choking are rife among the patients at Craiglockhart (who include Wilfred Owen). Hostility prickles between a doctor brutally eager to galvanize men out of their mutism by applying fierce electric shocks to the throat and the army psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who conducts psychotherapy sessions. One of his patients is the soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose anti-war protests the military authorities are striving to silence. The next novel in the sequence, The Eye in the Door (1993), shows censorship and the gagging of free speech grimly worsening in the war-worn nation.

“There are lots of speech impediments in my work, of one kind or another”, Barker remarked in that same Times interview. This is both true and ironic, given her flair for dialogue. The attempt to overcome impediments to communicating the atrocities of war was also central to her second trilogy concerning the traumas of 1914–18. In Life Class (2007), Toby’s Room (2012) and Noonday (2015), the focus swivelled from the verbal to the visual, to consider a group of artists (fictional composites of the talented prewar generation of painters at the Slade: Paul Nash, Dora Carrington, Christopher Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer) who are trying to convey the carnage of the trenches and its crippling after-effects. Barker’s sole novel about contemporary warfare, Double Vision (2003) – whose epigraph, from Goya’s The Disasters of War series, is “One cannot look at this. I saw it. This is the truth” – had as its main figures a combat-zone photographer and a war reporter emotionally burnt out by what he has witnessed in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

With The Silence of the Girls (2018), Barker harked back to European literature’s archetypal armed conflict: the Trojan War. “What I took away from my first reading”, she has said of the Iliad, “was silence, because the girls whose fates are being decided say not a word. I knew I was going to have to write about it one day: about the experience of those silenced girls” (the Guardian, August 7, 2021). The Women of Troy (2021) continued her chronicling of that experience, a trilogy she now completes with The Voyage Home.

Affording ideal scope for tracing trauma, aftermath and the eventual emergence of new ways of life, the trilogy format well suits Barker’s enduring preoccupations. It is also, as Greek drama showed, well suited to the theme of uncoiling nemesis after primal crime. In The Voyage Home, all of this combines. Partly, the novel portrays the closing phase of the Greeks’ ten-year siege of Troy. Opening with Achilles’ triumphant battle cry ringing round the doomed city, The Silence of the Girls was suffused with the terror and turmoil of Troy’s devastation. In The Women of Troy, its “black and broken towers, like the fingers of a half-buried hand pointing accusingly at the sky”, were the backdrop to the camp on the shore where the increasingly fractious Greeks awaited a long-delayed shift in the wind to sail home.

The Voyage Home begins with the arrival of that favourable wind. Busy preparations are made to abandon the military camp and a city reduced to rubble. The harbour fills with “brown, fat-bellied cargo ships, sitting low in the water”, crammed with loot from Troy (including raped, enslaved women distributed to the victors). Black, beaked warships assemble to escort the fleet. As drums beat, sails swell and wind thrums in the rigging, all seems set for a buoyant return for the Greek expeditionary force. But, as the novel starts to intimate, one legendary story line will soon be intertwining with another. Awaiting Agamemnon, the conqueror of Troy, are the horrors of the house of Atreus.

True to Barker’s aim of opening a female perspective on the events of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls was narrated by Briseis, the queen of one of Troy’s satellite cities, Lyrnessus, who was handed to Achilles as a “prize of honour” (ie a spoil of war). Briseis also largely narrated The Women of Troy. In The Voyage Home, the spokeswoman is Ritsa, a friend of Briseis from Troy, now subjugated to serving Agamemnon’s war-trophy wife Cassandra (who, along with his wife in Mycenae, Clytemnestra, balefully preparing for his return, features in some third-person scenes). Cassandra, the prophetess cursed by Apollo never to be believed, presents a variant on Barker’s persisting engagement with modes of muteness. Frenziedly voluble, screaming out accurate predictions, she is nonetheless unable to communicate.

An uncanny sheen flickers over scenes at Mycenae, where Clytemnestra will take murderous revenge on Agamemnon for ritually sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia, ten years earlier, to gain a fair wind to Troy for his war fleet. Ghostly children’s voices shrill in the palace’s labyrinthine corridors. Little spectral handprints appear on its walls and small wet footprints mysteriously materialize near its well. They function as eerie reminders of Atreus’ butchering of his brother’s children, which unleashed a grisly chain reaction of bloodshed. But the supernatural note they strike can seem weirdly remote from the pungent physicality that gives most of the book its impact.

Deliberate anachronisms – a near-echo of Lady Macbeth, snatches of British soldiers’ songs – intermittently occur, as if to emphasize the perennial nature of warfare. To similar effect, Barker’s Greek and Trojan warriors were earlier shown bogged down in a battlefield of trenches, duckboards, sandbags and puffed-up generals resembling an eastern Mediterranean Western Front. Likewise, the mutually supportive female resilience portrayed throughout her Trojan trilogy mirrors that of the Tyneside working-class women banded together against male violence in Blow Your House Down. Analogies with present-day “rape camps”, attempted genocides and forced mass evacuations are graphically brought to mind in Barker’s reworking of heroic myth.

The current plethora of retellings of Greek legend can seem rather numbing. (Medusa has re-emerged in so many novels as a garrulous Gorgon that there seems less risk of petrifaction by her gaze than of being bored rigid by her self-justifying recollections.) But the trilogy that The Voyage Home concludes stands out as the work of a novelist matchless in her imaginative and informed response to war.

Peter Kemp’s most recent book is Retroland: A reader’s guide to the dazzling diversity of modern fiction, 2023

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post At the House of Atreus appeared first on TLS.