Review: Sarah Ruden on Pat Barker

Refreshing update of the classics, or wishful betrayal of the past?

Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (the third volume of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995), about psychological trauma from World War I, seems to have been poor preparation for her subsequent project, in spite of the shared subject of war’s personal repercussions: a rewrite of Homer. The first volume of this new trilogy, The Silence of …