Last year, the Booker Prize dominated my reading of new books. And I only read four! The truth is, I read very little 21st-century literature.

But I recently read Pat Barker’s new novel, The Voyage Home, the third in her Women of Troy series, and felt obligated to review it. It is the reflex of a conscientious blogger.

I wrote three sentences and stopped. I wrote,

Retold myths are a big business these days, but I am not sure Pat Barker’s new novel The Voyage Home fits that category. Barker won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the third in her Regeneration trilogy, so perhaps that makes her a literary contender for the 2025 Booker: three’s the charm. Set after the Trojan War, the trilogy follows the lives of the enslaved Trojan women.

I could not go on. I had writer’s block. Just like that.

A few hours later…

Oh, c’mon. Keep going!

And so I wrote on.

Ritza, the observant narrator of Barker’s new novel, has a powerful voice.

A former healer, Ritza has been enslaved by the Greeks, and assigned to be Cassandra’s “body slave.” She feels impatient with the entitled Cassandra, a Trojan princess and a priestess of Apollo, who was cursed by Apollo, given the gift of prophecy with a twist: no one will believe her predictions and warnings. It irritates Ritza to wait on Cassandra, a reckless brat even now that she is the slave-concubine-bride of King Agamemnon.

Cassandra has quite a prophecy for her master: his wife Clytemnestra will kill them after their voyage to Mycenae. Agamemnon is startled, then laughs it off.

Barker’s strength is not so much in her characterization as in her eerie gift of direct language. Barker is a stunning stylist highlighting strange colors, animal totems, smells, and, of all things, a poison garden.

Here is Ritza’s strange description of Cassandra in Barker’s strong opening paragraph:

She had yellow eyes. At times, particularly by candlelight, they scarcely looked like human eyes at all. Calchas, the priest, once said they reminded him of a goat’s eyes: that she had the same numbed look of a sacrifice. I never saw her like that. She reminded me of a sea eagle, a common enough bird on the coast where I grew up; the sailors call it “the eagle with the sunlit eyes.” And its eyes are beautiful, but it doesn’t do to forget the brutal beak, the talons sharp enough to tear living flesh from bone.

Brilliant writing, like a Greek tragedy in prose, and I admired it. And then I felt the last few chapters sagged a bit. Still, The Voyage Home is by far the best of this series. The first two are narrated by the enslaved princess Briseis, and Ritsa’s voice is much stronger and more engaging.

But… I have nothing much to say! Do you ever like a book, but want a breather from thinking? You just want to lose yourself in the book…

That was the case here.

A few weeks ago I read Euripides’s Hecuba, one of his most powerful tragedies. Yet somehow it is too violent, too cruel, Trojan turning on Trojan, a Trojan friend, Polymestor, killing Hecuba’s last remaining son. Her one surviving child (our of 50) is Cassandra. Bizarrely, it is Agamemnon who judges the case of her son’s murder and finds Polymestor guilty. But Hecuba’s violent revenge on Polymestor leaves us speechless. Euripides/Hecuba goes too far. I shan’t reread this one.

O gods/Is there no end to this ordeal of suffering,/this struggle of despair? – Hecuba, by Euripides

By the way, there are many, many retold myths of Cassandra. Here are a few examples.

• Cassandra, by Christa Wolf
• “Cassandra,” by C. J. Cherryh (a Hugo Award-winning science fiction short story)
• The Cassandra, by Sharma Shield
• Trojan Women, by Euripides
• Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem, by the Ukrainian writer Lesia Ukrainka