The Voyage Home: A Novel (The Women of Troy Series)
“a phenomenal book, the conclusion to a magnificent trilogy as well-written and psychologically powerful as the Regeneration Trilogy, which raised Barker’s stature more than three decades ago.”
The third book in Barker’s Iliad Trilogy, The Voyage Home, picks up only hours after The Women of Troy breaks off, with the Greeks departing Trojan shores for their separate kingdoms. With the triumphant kings travel their spoils: women taken as prizes throughout the decade of warfare, whose perspectives carry all three novels. Briseis, prize of Achilles, whose voice breaks The Silence of the Girls will not be seen again. Nor will Hecuba, former Queen of Troy, who plotted through The Women of Troy. She is the prize of Odysseus, whose shipwrecks will lose that queen her life long before he reaches Ithaca, some ten years in the future.
The Voyage Home tracks three women, all bound to King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army. Agamemnon has taken as his prize (and perhaps as his wife, though his sincerity in that marriage is certainly in question) Cassandra, princess of troy and priestess of Apollo, blessed with true prophecy and cursed never to be believed. Cassandra is served, coaxed, and nursed by Ritsa, a healer and midwife long since herself taken as a slave and previously maid to Briseis. These two travel with Agamemnon toward his kingdom of Mycenae, where the queen Clytemnestra awaits.
The first book of this trilogy is framed by the events of the Iliad. The second re-narrates Euripides’ The Trojan Women and Hecuba (the events of which might be better known to modern readers through the words of the Player King in Hamlet, whose account of those events reduces both the player and Hamlet to tears, and drives Hamlet to demand, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?”). The Voyage Home leads its characters from Homer’s epic setting to Aeschylus’ opening of The Oresteia. We are, as inevitably as the characters, moving from the horrors of war to epic Greek tragedy.
More than in the other novels, here Barker uses the tension of prophecy and the inevitability of ancient stories to create tension. Cassandra has prophesied that she and Agamemnon will die on their first night in his palace, though, as always, no one believes her (except the reader). Lovers of Clytemnestra already know what she plans. No one, not even Agamemnon himself, denies that Agamemnon deserves all the horrors about to descend on him, though the characters disagree as to exactly why, and for which atrocities, his fate is deserved.
Agamemnon’s taking of Briseis from Achilles triggered the bloodbath at the heart of The Iliad. By Agamemnon’s orders were all the male children, down to the infants, of Troy massacred. To Ritsa, Agamemnon’s a selfish bastard whose suffering is a moderately enjoyable spectacle. To Cassandra, Agamemnon’s a rapist, the butcher of her family, and if her own life is the price of his, she’ll happily pay. But to Clytemnestra, Agamemnon is a treacherous husband, less for his marriage to Cassandra than his sacrifice/murder of his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia to ensure a wind that carried his army to Troy. Ten years have done nothing to break down her grief. She’s a woman cold with determination, willing to do what is necessary, and willing to carry out a long, slow plan to achieve her goals.
Barker pushes back against misogynist narratives of these women, as she has with so many others. Clytemnestra is neither witch nor adulteress. Men who hate her rule in Mycenae spread rumors of her depravity; those rumors don’t need to be true to be powerful, and Barker creates a middle-aged queen content to live with others’ disregard for her so long as their contempt doesn’t interfere with her own plans.
Clytemnestra is mother to two more living children—Orestes, who will kill her, and Electra, whose puerile clinging to her mother’s skirts and low-key violence against her mother’s flesh make her a subtly terrifying figure. None of this is accidental: the younger children’s pathologies (named by Freud for his own purposes) are products of their mother’s distracted and obsessive grief.
If The Voyage Home has a flaw, it’s that its ending is so near its beginning (the entire story covers less than a week, in comparison with the months that pass in the other two novels) and so entirely set. Death will come to two of its three protagonists, and very soon. Only Ritsa, so often ignored as a slave, is left with an open fate. Inevitably, then, her story is the most interesting of the three, inviting emotional investment that’s so obviously wasted on the novel’s other characters, whose fates are not only set but in many ways willingly chosen. Yet this is a small flaw in a phenomenal book, the conclusion to a magnificent trilogy as well-written and psychologically powerful as the Regeneration Trilogy, which raised Barker’s stature more than three decades ago.