Has a scope and power that rest on the foundation of five decades of serious, probing work. Barker can be blistering about male arrogance and brutality toward women, but her core subject is the human capacity for violence ... Has a decidedly creepy atmosphere that’s new for Barker and yet distinctively her own, with the macabre mix of nursery rhymes repurposed to malevolent effect.
This is a novel about how women respond to unendurable trauma — the destruction of their homes, the murder of all their loved ones, the prospect of endless sexual violence. But what makes this so fresh and engaging is Barker’s ability to translate these ancient people into vernacular voices that dissolve the millennia separating us ... The tenor of Ritsa’s narration constantly scrapes away the patina of epic glory and forces us, with her humor and her candor, to consider the lived experience of these people who caused and endured constant tides of violence and degradation ... The gods have set down their inalterable decrees, and Aeschylus has spilled all the spoilers, but Barker still manages to make these bloody stories moan with dread and snap with surprise. The slaughter that Cassandra foresees and legends have retold for millennia splashes across these pages in all its shocking, slick gore.
Barker’s language is gorgeously, reliably rich and salty, and the book is peppered with quickfire, rebarbative dialogue ... Fascinating ... Parker doesn’t spare us the grisly imagery but it’s mostly a desperate sadness that prevails in the shadowy rooms ... This is domestic drama as much as epic and it is where the success of the novel lies: the squalid human tragedy, the pointlessness of the war machine.
Rich and electrifying ... Focused, propulsive and firmly contemporary, plotting a gripping route through Homer’s source material to expose the ripple effects of male violence and destruction ... The assurance and wisdom with which Barker handles this encounter speaks to not only to her experience – she is now in her fifth decade as a writer – but her immense compassion for the women she depicts.
Ever-present electricity ... Somehow, the two-speed pacing makes caring equally about both strands peculiarly tricky ... The climax of Ritsa’s tale feels like it belongs in a different novel, centred on the unlikely solace she finds in the arms of an invader.
Barker’s vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people’s sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge. More brilliant work from one of world literature’s greatest writers.
