She takes her lead, of course, from the likes of Euripides's The Trojan Women and Ovid's Heroides, but while those texts still centred the women in relation to the men, Barker looks well beyond her characters' roles as spoils of war, turning them into real people some terrified, some defiant, but each with their own story to tell. Barker's subjects are the women who flit around the edges of the tales that have been told about these legendary warriors. Skittish, inexperienced Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, sits with his father's men – "all intertwined and wriggling like worms in a horse's s-" – deep in the bowels of the wooden animal, the air around him thick with the stench of sweat and fear.Īs the title suggests though, this is not Pyrrhus's – or any man's – story. Take the magnificent opening chapter of her new novel, The Women of Troy, which takes us inside the Trojan Horse. Pat Barker – who won the 1995 Booker Prize for the final volume of her masterful Regeneration trilogy about the horrors of the First World War – has never been one to shy away from the nerve-shredding blood and guts of battle.
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