BrokenTune asked me, whether or not Pat Barker is able to transport me to Ancient Greece:
What I remember most - apart from the awful, straining, wide-eyed terror of the first few days - is the curious mixture of riches and squalor. Achilles dined of gold plate, rested his feet in the evening on a footstool inlaid with ivory, slept under bedcovers embroidered with gold and silver thread. Every morning, as he combed and braided his hair - and no girl ever dressed more carefully for her wedding day than Achilles for the battlefield - he checked the effect in the bronze mirror that must have been worth a king´s ransom. And yet, if he needed a shit after dinner, he took a square of coarse cloth from a pile in the corner of the hall and set off to a latrine that stank to high heaven and was covered in a pelt of black buzzing flies of at regular intervals, but never was, and consequently had become a breeding ground for rats.
That´s the other thing I remember: the rats. Rats everywhere. You could be walking along the path between two rows of huts and suddenly the ground ahead of you would get up and walk - oh, yes, as bad as that! The skinny, half-wilde dogs that roamed the camp were meant to control the rats, but somehow they never did. Myron, who was in charge of the upkeep of Achilles´ compound, used to organize the younger fighters into rat-hunting contests with prizes of strong wine for the winner. You´d see young men strutting about with rows of little corpses impaled on their spears: rat kebabs. But however many they killed, there always seemed to be plenty more.
She certainly is able to transport me to a battle camp in Ancient Greece. The grit is practically oozing from the pages. And I love the description of Achilles.
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