as the cover said when my bookmark fell across across it –
There are 36 chapters in the book; 8 of them are in present tense (3rd person singular POV). These chapters belong to Pyrrhus or Calchas, who are men, the only men whose points or view are included. All the other chapters are narrated in the voice of Briseis, 1st person singular POV, past tense.
At one point Barker describes Pyrrhus as a sociopath. That, with his red hair, might suggest a recent real-life model for some of the character’s behaviour and his first predicament.
Calchas isn’t described as a sociopath, though he is described as “cold.” And so I think the point is that both men are in cults – Calchas a Trojan priest, pretty much indentured to the temple by his parents; Pyrrhus, as his son, encased in the cult of Achilles. Neither feels he has had any choice about the path his life must follow.
When Helenus, Andromache’s twin brother, points out to Pyrrhus that his father was a guest of Achilles and that this guest-friend relationship has passed down to them both, he asks Pyrrhus for food. Pyrrhus opens the hut door to him, “and lets the future in.”
This is the only utterance in the book that lies outside the situation itself, the strip of beach on the Trojan shore the Greeks have made hideous. It's abstract; it leaps off the page.
The syntax is being used to say that only adults have a past and future, that the choiceless are like children, confined to an uncontrolled and unevaluated present. Oh, the present is experienced, all right, but not stood apart from, judged accurately, coped with, modified in any self-directed way; the present is like the cult and all-encompassing: unbreakoutable of, unprogressable from.
Time passes for Briseis and the rest; people die, fates wend their way to their horrible, bursting ends. The point about adults and children is made in passing, but passing is the point.
The Women of Troy, Pat Barker, Doubleday, New York, 2021
