Pat Barker’s brilliant new novelistic retelling of The Iliad puts the experience of women like Andromache at the heart of the story: the women who survive in slavery when men destroy their cities and kill their fathers, brothers and children. He hopes only to be dead before he has to hear her screams. Hector knows this, but he insists that his own need to avoid social humiliation as a battle-shirker trumps it all: “I would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women,” he says. If Hector dies, their child will be hurled from the city walls, Troy will fall and Andromache will be made the concubine of the son of her husband’s killer. She has already endured the sack of her home city by Achilles, and seen the slaughter of her father and seven brothers, and the enslavement of her mother. Andromache pleads with her Trojan husband Hector not to leave her and their infant son to go back to fight Achilles. They grieve for their dead sons, dead fathers, dead husbands and dead protectors for the city of Troy, soon to fall, and for their own freedom, taken by the victors of war. The women are not entirely silent, and goddesses always have plenty to say, but mortal women speak primarily to lament. I n The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of women are the objects through which men struggle with each other for status.
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