Even as a schoolboy I was struck by the lie that the Greek myths were tales of heroism. The heroes were rotten. Jason dumps his lover Medea as soon as she helps him get the Golden Fleece. Theseus abandons Ariadne after he’s used her to defeat the Minotaur.

Heroines aren’t much better. Medea murders her children with Jason in revenge for his adultery. The Gods are either rapists or sadists. Zeus is both: the king of Olympus is a serial sex murderer.

Victims are disposable trash. These myths invented the notion of gaslighting. Medusa is painted as the quintessential monster. However, she was an ordinary woman raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple.

The goddess was outraged. Not at her sea-god uncle, but at Medusa for being raped. Athena transformed Medusa into the misshapen creature of legend as punishment.

Pat Barker shares all my misgivings about Greek myths in The Voyage Home - the final book in her Trojan War trilogy.

Another theme from Greek mythology that’s unsettlingly present here is the sheer amount of child-eating. In the Greek creation myths, Cronus consumes his children - though Zeus escapes.

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In fairness, there’s an intense amount of parent-killing as well. Cronus got to the top by slicing off the testicles of his own father Uranus. When Zeus in turn overthrows Cronus, he cuts his dad’s tackle off too. What goes around comes around, evidently.

In Barker’s hands, these dark leitmotifs from Greek myth become the stuff of gothic - yet very domestic - horror.

Her tale centres on the return of the victorious Agamemnon from Troy. The king levelled the city. Babies were speared and thrown from battlements. Every Trojan woman taken into captivity. Agamemnon now ‘owns’ the Trojan princess Casandra as his slave and concubine - after she’s raped by his side-kick.

We see the story unfold, however, through the eyes of ‘a slave’s slave’: Ritsa, maid to Casandra. Ritsa was a Trojan healer, a woman of standing, before being turned into a ‘catch-fart’, her term for the lowest of the low.

Ritsa brims with life. Put upon constantly, she’s never without steel, cunning and humour. Barker gives a northern England twang to her dialogue, and I couldn’t help but think of Coronation Street’s Elsie Tanner.

Barker’s trilogy has been explicitly - rightly - feminist, centring the hyper-masculine stories of Troy on the women who suffered through this Bronze Age apocalypse.

One of the most stomach-churning moments found here - and there’s many - sees a powerful Greek hero, who’s shown kindness towards Ritsa, rape her simply because he can.

However, the dark heart of this novel is Agamemnon. Vengeance awaits the returning king. Before he departed for Troy, he sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia, slitting her throat in return for a good voyage. None of his captains, priests or soldiers batted an eyelid.

The Voyage Home by Pat BarkerThe Voyage Home by Pat Barker (Image: free)

Yet, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, isn’t some bootlicker. She’s a mother. Steeped in hate, fear and jealousy, this remarkable, terrifying woman overshadows her boorish husband.

The stories of the fate and familial horror which surround Agamemnon, his children and his wife were - along with the markedly similar cycle of plays about the curse of Oedipus - the very foundation of ancient Greek drama.

Barker strips away all the grandeur of The Oresteia - the trilogy about Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their children written around 450BC - and renders this as a sordid horror movie of a story. There’s more of Hollywood, than Aeschylus on these pages.

However, as with Greek tragedy, the sense runs strong that what awaits these characters was predestined before their birth. And it’s here we must return to the baby-eating.

Astonishingly, Agamemnon is among the least disgusting of all his many disgusting forbears. His father Atreus, killed his own nephews, baked them in a pie and fed them to his brother. Once his brother had unwittingly gobbled up his kids, Atreus delighted in showing him their severed hands and feet.

The father of Atreus was Pelops, who assassinated his father-in-law. Pelop’s father was Tantalus. He planned to kill his son and feed him to the gods to prove he was greater than the Olympians. The House of Atreus, as it’s known, makes the Borgias look neighbourly.

Throughout the book, those children which Atreus killed and baked in a pie hover over the action. Little handprints appear on walls and behind tapestries. There’s strange giggles in dark hallways, and nursery rhymes sung in empty rooms behind closed doors.

Is it ghosts? Hysteria caused by collective guilt? Don’t forget, the entire palace - from slave to royal adviser - was there when Atreus carried out his crimes.

However, rather than some supernatural sense of relentless fate rolling towards Agamemnon, in Barker’s hands this is an old-fashioned revenge tragedy.

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Clytemnestra isn’t possessed by the Furies - those mythological creatures who act as judge, jury and executioner if we carry out foul crimes; she’s inspired by the very human need for justice. The blood of her child calls out for blood to be paid in return.

There’s much of both Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, in this book, centred as it is on women in the grip of dark and terrifying passions.

Yet, it’s the Brontë sisters who feel the greatest influence. There’s certainly shades of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, yet the biggest debt is to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

While the gothic was raised from mere genre to greatness in the hands of both sisters, Charlotte was more concerned with form and story, whilst Emily was elemental, wild, disturbing.

There’s more Charlotte than Emily in Barker. Narrative, and the construction of the gothic style, clearly matter to her. However, the book does lack the plunging, deranging emotional depth of Emily - who was probably much more in tune with the spirit of the Greek playwrights than her sister.

And while this is an exceptional book - which I urge everyone to read - even the story, great as it is, does leave you wanting more. What is Barker telling us, beyond the notion that women suffer abominably at the hands of men, and have done for millennia?

Certainly, that story is worth repeating. But for three books now, we’ve been told that men are brutes and women are victims. We know this truth. The final part of her trilogy seems to cry out for something more, for greater complexity, and it’s not there.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker is published by Hamish Hamilton priced £20