The Voyage Home - Pat Barker

[troisoiseaux]

Read The Voyage Home by Pat Barker, concluding her Women-Centric Trojan War Retelling trilogy with Agamemnon's return to Mycenae, Cassandra (and an original character, an enslaved Trojan woman) in tow, and Clytemnestra's revenge for his murder of their daughter ten years earlier. It was... fine? Better than Jennifer Saint's Elektra, as a retelling of this particular myth, although that isn't saying much. I get why the primary narrator was an everywoman OC, and why Barker gave her a nice romantic interest and a way out, but I found the chapters from Cassandra's and Clytemnestra's POVs more interesting. This novel was at its best when it was being creepy: the House of Atreus as a literally haunted house, where small bloody handprints appear on the walls and ghostly children's voices and footsteps echo down the halls; the scene where Cassandra, well aware of her own impending death, discovers the murder bathhouse that Clytemnestra has built for Agamemnon and reacts like a kid in a toy shop: the nets! the sewn-up robe! how clever! On the other hand, it leaned so hard into the "Oresteia as gothic horror" lens that it fell through the other side and straight into heavily implied Orestes/Electra incest... which is the point where it occurred to me that Baker was going for kind of a gothic horror thing, because even with the literal ghosts, the overall tone was... not that? Which kind of makes me want to read a retelling of the Oresteia that really commits to being a gothic horror novel, actually.