My Five Word TL:DR Review: But Is this the conclusion?

I’ve loved reading Pat Barker’s imaginative retellings where the women of Troy are given a voice and opportunity to tell their story.  Seriously, this series is amazing.  I’m not sure if this is the final instalment, the title has the ring of a final book in series but if more books are forthcoming I’ll certainly be there for them.  This particular story brings to us three women, two of them well known in terms of Greek mythology, Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon.  In this retelling they are joined by a fictional character called Ritsa who serves as Cassandra’s body woman.

We begin the story with the voyage home where both women tread a fine line between pride and fear.  Cassandra, once a priestess, a prophet that no one pays any regard to and now the trophy wife of Agamemnon almost longs for the voyage to end.  She has foretold both her own and her husband’s death and whilst no one believes her she awaits her own end with no sense of dread, believing that for the prophecy to come true it must unfold in its entirety.  Her slave Ritsa, formerly a healer is an easy to like and down to earth woman.  She has known her own tragedy and it takes a while for her and Cassandra to strike a balance.  Clytemnestra has also patiently awaited her husband’s return.  She longs to avenge her daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father to appease the Gods and gain a fair wind.

What I really enjoyed about this.

Once again the story is told in a very easy to access voice.  I think perhaps this instalment felt a little more modern than the previous two books although I could be misremembering, but the places are always easy to imagine and the characters are really well drawn with the minimum fuss.

If you know the story then clearly the author is working within certain restraints and being a Greek tragedy there’s no escaping the inevitable  What made this slightly different was giving us a fictional voice to allow glimpses into other aspects of the lives of these characters.  Ritsa, being the slave of Cassandra is given some agency to come and go, her movements not always as closely observed as the other two women and therefore showing us the life that everyday folk lived.  The herb gardens, the strange, rambling and disorientating palace, haunted by terrible deeds from the past, the claustrophobic ship that conveyed these women to Greece.

Agamemnon had no fear returning home, he resumed his role as King with swift ease, never once deferring to his wife, he assumed her subservience as his natural right and had no compunction about flaunting his young concubine.  At the end of the day his arrogance led him blindly to his own downfall, it never occurred to him to have any fear of his wife, a woman eaten by the need for revenge.

The other thing that really hit me whilst reading was this secret longing for a different ending, this strange and unrealistic hope that maybe things will end differently for these women.  It shows how the author draws you in and makes you form attachments, her storytelling is so good that you being to hope for something to change but at the same time you already know the outcome.

In conclusion this is an excellent series.  I’ve enjoyed all these retellings.  The writing is good, the author portrays the struggles and horror in such a way that there is no sensationalising of the brutality just a clear description of events that really bring home to you the cruelty and arrogance, the lack of feeling even, of some of these powerful men.

I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks.  The above is my own opinion.

My rating 4.5 of 5 remarkably told tales stars