THE WOMEN OF TROY by Pat Barker

“Vintage Barker: challenging, stimulating, and profoundly satisfying.”

the women of troy

THE WOMEN OF TROY

Barker, Pat Doubleday (304 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 24, 2021 978-0-385-54669-0

Engrossing follow-up to the gritty reimagining of the Trojan War begun in The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker opens “inside the horse’s gut: heat, darkness, sweat, fear,” as Greek soldiers wait to see if the Trojans will wheel the wooden horse into the city and seal its fate. We look through the eyes of Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, terrified that he will never live up to the mighty reputation of his dead father. The insecurity behind male violence is a theme from the moment Pyrrhus blunderingly hacks to death Trojan king Priam in front of an altar, a sacrilege that is punished by winds that make it impossible for the Greek ships to set sail for home. Briseis, the enslaved narrator of the previous novel, picks up the story in Chapter 3. Now pregnant with Achilles’ child and married (at his request) to a Greek warrior, she’s well aware that any misstep on her part could send her back to the slave quarters. Trouble stirs there with Amina, who is determined to properly bury Priam’s maimed corpse, left to rot in the open by Pyrrhus. “You’re a girl, Amina. You can’t fight the kings,” Briseis wearily tells her. Her hard-won knowledge that “the only thing that mattered in this camp was power” doesn’t prevent Briseis from feeling sympathy in addition to exasperation for idealistic Amina, vengeanceobsessed Trojan royals Hecuba and Cassandra (now slaves), and even for brutal, conflicted Pyrrhus and other male characters drawn with the same shrewdness. Barker’s blunt, earthy prose strips the romance from Greek mythology, revealing its foundations in murder and oppression, yet she also understands—and conveys—the stark appeal of these ancient stories as she asks us to reconsider them through the eyes of their victims. As with her masterful Regeneration trilogy, the inconclusive close of this volume leaves readers hungry to know what happens next to a host of complex and engaging characters.

Vintage Barker: challenging, stimulating, and profoundly satisfying.

RABBIT HOLE

Billingham, Mark Atlantic Monthly (400 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 3, 2021 978-0-8021-5870-3

The creator of DI Tom Thorne presents a stand-alone whodunit with a most unusual setting: the psychiatric ward of a northwest London hospital. DC Alice Armitage, who suffered an acute case of PTSD when her partner was stabbed to death during a routine search for a culprit, became so disturbed that she conked her boyfriend, Andy Flanagan, with a wine bottle and was committed to the Shackleton Unit of Hendon Community Hospital. At least that’s the story she tells everyone who’ll listen. Though it’s clear that Al is a patient in the Fleet Ward, however, it’s far from clear to anyone else that she was ever with Met homicide; it may be that she’s just as delusional as posh drug abuser Lucy, bipolar chess player Ilias, compulsive singer Lauren, kilt-wearing Tony, needy young Shaun, or Graham, who bangs his head so frequently against a wall that the staff keeps having to repaint the spot. Ordinarily the question of Al’s professional employment would be moot, but when Shaun’s lover, Kevin Connolly, is smothered with a pillow and drugs are discovered in his room, Al swings into gear even though no one else accepts her bona fides—not the other patients, not Debbie McClure or any of the other nurses and staffers, and certainly not DC Steve Seddon or any of the other officers tasked with investigating. Al must launch an investigation on her own even as she’s confined to the ward, doped with medications, and treated to the opposite of cooperation from the officials.

A great premise generates some powerful episodes. Only the identification of the culprit is a letdown.

TALK TO ME

Boyle, T.C. Ecco/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-0-06-305285-7

Farce meets tragedy and science meets show business in this romantic triangle featuring a student, a professor, and a chimpanzee. There’s an antic energy to Boyle’s latest which comes at the expense of character development. Aimee Villard is naïve and beautiful, a college student who recognizes how attractive she is because of her effect on men—and a certain chimpanzee. Yet she refuses to use her beauty to manipulate and thus provides this novel with its heart. She is a cliché of the innocent young coed when that term was used often and seemingly without condescension. Guy Schermerhorn is a professor who’s deeply invested in researching the communicative possibilities between humankind and the simian world and who parlays that work into TV appearances. After his marriage falls apart, he falls in love, or lust, with Aimee, whom he’s hired to help with his live-in chimpanzee. The chimp, named Sam, also falls in love with Aimee because of the same animal magnetism that attracts Guy. As the characters in this novel respond to animal urges and instincts, Sam emerges as the most complex. Short chapters written to capture his perspective alternate with longer ones that find his human enablers attempting to deal with whatever mischief he has made. And they alternate along different timelines, with Sam’s chapters often reflecting a near future that the humans have yet to experience. Sam can talk with sign language and understand, he responds to treats and to scolding, but he also learns to lie and scheme and manipulate, aping human behavior. As Sam and Guy compete for Aimee’s affection (which she shares with both), Aimee and Guy compete for Sam’s favor. And all of them must contend with another professor, a supervisor to whom Guy reports, who is some sort of alpha male. Or maybe God—to the animals, at least. Despite his domestication, Sam occasionally

shows signs of being a wild animal. This can’t end well, and it doesn’t, as a comedy of manners takes a darker turn.

There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.

ANOTHER KIND OF EDEN

Burke, James Lee Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 17, 2021 978-1-982151-71-3

Ten years after dropping him in Houston, Burke picks up the story of Aaron Holland Broussard in 1962 Colorado. The story is as eventful as ever. When Aaron, Spud Caudill, and Cotton Williams, all of whom work at Jude Lowry’s dairy and produce farm, make a delivery in Lowry’s truck, a pair of tough guys, incensed at the United Farm Workers bumper sticker Aaron never noticed, beat them up. As if to rub salt into the wound, the ringleader’s father, Rueben Vickers, brings his son out to Lowry’s to demand an explanation for how his boy Darrel got bruised. Aaron, a man who’s “incapable of deliberately doing wrong” even when he’s “surrounded by evil,” doesn’t lose his cool, but the serious moral judgments he levels against the old man provoke Rueben to whip him on the spot. His head-over-heels attraction to cafe waitress/painter Jo Anne McDuffy doesn’t offer much relief: She’s slow to reciprocate his interest, and her involvement with Henri Devos, the smarmy, self-satisfied art professor who’s borrowed $500 from her, is murky and gets even murkier once Aaron meets hophead Marvin Fogel and the other preHaight groupies Devos is hosting in a school bus. As usual, Burke orchestrates a series of escalating encounters between Aaron and the Vickers father and son that promise a violent release, but this time the violence is mostly withheld (except for the obligatory backstories and some nameless prostitutes recently killed) until the ending, which has all the intensity of a fever dream and not much more explanatory power.

The haunted hero is last spotted near Flagstaff, from which fans will surely look forward to hearing more. And more.

FERAL CREATURES

Buxton, Kira Jane Grand Central Publishing (368 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 24, 2021 978-1-5387-3524-4

A sequel to Hollow Kingdom (2019) in which clever talking crow S.T. must raise Dee, the last human on Earth, to keep the Changed Ones from destroying all remaining nature. Delightful, raucous, and bighearted S.T. has pecked off more than he can chew when it comes to raising the MoFo (human) child, Dee. Before her mother succumbed to the virus killing and changing all humankind, she left Dee in the care of the trees and birds of the Alaskan tundra. As Dee becomes a teenager, she learns to speak the languages of the natural world, much to S.T.’s chagrin. He wants her to imitate the MoFos he loved in the before-times, but Dee only wants to be a crow, a bee, a fish, or a musk ox. When they butt heads, Dee’s human emotions often end in angry, dangerous outbursts or the deep sorrow of depression. All S.T. wants is to keep Dee safe from predators, both natural and the decidedly unnatural Changed Ones—former humans, ravaged by the virus and quickly evolving into grotesque superpredators. All Dee wants is to throw herself into adventure and protect the animals she loves dearly but can never quite become. Then, when the creatures of the ocean and their prophet Onida call Dee from the tundra to Seattle, the heart of the outbreak, to stop the Changed Ones from further upsetting the natural order, S.T. ignores his animal friends. He tries to hide Dee away and force her to be something she isn’t. But Dee has other ideas, and together they are swept up by orcas and taken to S.T.’s old home. There, crows, tigers, owls, house cats, elephants, and all manner of creature must decide if Dee is a savior worth trusting

or a danger that will lead them to their end. She is a human, after all. Like its predecessor, this is a genre-bending, humorous twist on the zombie apocalypse from a bird’s-eye view, but it, too, is bogged down by tedious exposition and too many morality tales shoehorned into one narrative. The addition of violence against women as a mostly underdeveloped plot device is particularly worth noting for sensitive readers. Repetitive wordplay, exhaustive lists, and convenient scenarios fight with brilliant humor, clever characters, and an intriguing look at the relationship between parents and the children who don’t conform to their expectations.

Exceptional in theory but too busy to fully deliver.

THE YARDS

Carter, A.F. Mysterious Press (308 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-61316-235-4

A woman struggling to rise above her troubled roots is challenged by temptation and hounded by murder. Working two jobs that keep her away from her beloved 8-year-old daughter, Charlotte, for more than 70 hours a week doesn’t leave nurse Bridget “Git” O’Rourke much time to enjoy herself. So once a month or so she likes to cut loose, don her designer lingerie, have her alcoholic ex-beautician mother do her makeup, and head off to a local bar in search of an evening’s pleasure. The night she spots Bradley Grieg at the aptly named Randy’s Tavern starts out like many another of her flings but ends with her hookup shot dead and robbed of $18,000. Lt. Delia Mariola, head of detectives for the Baxter police force,