![]() ![]() ![]() "But perhaps readers are fed up of ephemeral stories – they’re bombarded with them – and these stories, more than any others really, have stood the test of time."īarker, 78, came late to an interest in the Trojan War. ![]() "There’s an awful lot of us suddenly." She is, frankly, puzzled by this explosion of interest in Greek myth, which only detonated after she was well into the writing of The Silence of the Girls. He bounded up and shook hands, and said: ‘We are the new mythologisers’," Barker tells me with a laugh. It will almost inevitably join its predecessor on the bestseller lists, alongside a slew of recent retellings of Greek myths and legends by Madeline Miller, Stephen Fry and others. Her new novel, The Women of Troy, goes on to tell the story of that war’s aftermath – once again, mainly from the viewpoint of Briseis, a princess taken as a sex slave by the invading Greek hero Achilles. She conveyed anew the horror and barbarity of the Great War in her Regeneration and Life Class trilogies and astonishingly, in her 2018 novel The Silence of the Girls, she managed to evoke with equal vividness a conflict that may never actually have taken place – the Trojan War. Pat Barker has the gift of writing about long-ago wars in a way that makes them seem as urgent as the bulletins from any country in crisis. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |