You know, tigers are mothers too but you wouldn’t want to meet one.”Īs with much historical fiction, there is a contemporary parallel to be drawn between The Women of Troy and modern events. It’s sometimes assumed that because women are mothers they extend that nurturing principle to more or less everybody they meet. I was brought up very, very lively by my grandparents, and my grandmother was a blood relationship but my grandfather was her second husband, so there was no blood relationship there with him, and yet they were the parents in my life, and I’ve always been very aware of the possibilities of being parented by people who are not your actual biological parents.”īarker certainly subverts our assumptions about women being the kinder and more caring sex in The Women of Troy. A lot of the characters in my books are being mothered or fathered but not by their biological parents. “I’m very interested in parent-child relationships,” she says, “and in substitute parent-child relationships.
“It may even be a quartet!”īorn in 1943 in the north of England, Barker was raised by her grandparents from the age of seven, after her mother, who had Barker during the war, got married and left the family home. “I’m not admitting to anything,” she says, laughing down the phone line from her home in Durham.
Having sworn she would never write another trilogy, Barker appears to be knee-deep in one.
Her new novel, The Women of Troy, picks up the story where the last one left off. Her last novel, The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad from the Trojan women’s perspectives, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019. Best known for her Regeneration trilogy, the third book of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995, Barker is still stridently writing essential and vibrant fiction well into her 70s. When it comes to grandes dames of English literature, they don’t come much grander than Pat Barker.
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