The Silence of the Girls is bound to be a classic - it is beautifully and powerfully written. Ordinarily this is not the sort of book I would choose to read as I mostly read for pleasure. But I am so happy to have read it and happier still to recommend it. It is utterly compelling, extraordinarily meaningful and still so very relevant. This is a book that needs to be widely read and taught to future generations so that we might learn from it!

Giving a voice to those who were – and, at times still are – the spoils of war

Pat Barker has long celebrated ‘ordinary’ people who are swept up in the making of history – which, sadly, is often the history of conflict. She does not forget that the lives of the untold millions matter, even if we don’t know their names

In this book, she goes for the jugular of very ancient conflicts indeed - the story told in The Iliad – we know the names of various kingly and warrior characters, but the women are few and far between. Helen, wife of Menelaus, captured by Paris,(did she run or was she abducted?) is probably the most recognisable name, reduced to that face that launched a thousand ships – as long long wars between Greece and Troy ensued

In this wonderful book The Silence of the Girls her central voice, the person whose story is followed, Is Briseis. Wife of a king, who was one of Troy’s allies (and of course, Briseis had no say in her choice of husband) when her husband’s kingdom is sacked by the Greeks – particularly Achilles, she becomes part of his booty. Her husband, her brothers, and all the males are automatically killed – including boy children. This is also the fate of women who have children in the womb – these might grow up to avenge their fathers in the fullness of time.

Other women are spoils, like material goods, to be shared by the victors. The high born may be the gift to commanders and kings, and the best that can be hoped for is to find favour. Otherwise, the women are there to be ‘enjoyed’ by the many.

This is indeed a brutal and a harrowing book, but Barker does not just leave Briseis and others as just brutalised victims. Women lived through this kind of dire history, still having to find a way to make their own lives matter.

More than the story of battling kings, - Priam, Agamemnon - bloody warrior heroes – Hector, Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus – it is the women, the powerless, the ones without the fine heroic lays devoted to their stories – who occupy the foreground here. And Barker makes me believe that these, who have come to us only as names, might indeed have been truly as she imagines them.

Recounting Priam, king of Troy, in supplication for the return of the broken and humiliated body of his son, Briseis contrasts the power a defeated king may still wield, with the lives, the lack of power, of the women, even the most powerful, who are objects of ownership, in her society:

I do what no man before me has ever done. I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son

Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought:

And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers

She does of course not flinch from how these human spoils of war were treated – the women who ‘belonged’ to the vanquished were there to slake the sexual thirst of the army just as captured wine and livestock were there to slake their appetite for food and drink – but she does not focus on the blow by blow, the awful and graphic details of their treatment by the conquering army. How, in this world, did these women live. What were their thoughts, their feelings, how did they adapt, how connect, how survive? Victims of war – but also individuals with histories – and also perhaps, desires for a future, perhaps even an imagination for the ending of endless war.

I recommend this, despite its awful subject matter, without reservation. Whilst steeped in the physical reality of those ancient times (she is marvellously visceral about what a battle encampment might have been like) the present, and the still far from equal lives of girls and women, in some parts of the world more obviously than in others, knocked insistently in my thoughts.

Books like this are wondrously important, wondrously imaginative, wondrously laying out myth and reality together

For those who know the story of the Iliad, repetition in this review would be unnecessary – but, more importantly, for those who don’t spoilers should not be revealed.

However, I cannot avoid this rather wonderful ‘preview opener’ a quote from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain’ which Barker quotes before her own novel begins :

“You know how European literature begins?” he’d ask….”With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight” And then he picked up his copy of The Iliad and read to the class the opening lines…. “Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles…Begin where they first quarrelled, Agamemnon the King of men and great Achilles” And what are they quarrelling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarrelling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war”

I received this as a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley

Pat Barker: The Silence of the Girls

The great epics of literature tend to be written by men and are mainly about men. Yes, I am well aware of The Tale of the Genji and Sappho, of women from Brunhilda to Cleopatra and of all the women that appear in Greek legends, from goddesses such as Diana and Aphrodite, the Muses and the Erinnyes, and Helen of Troy, Penelope and Clytemnestra. Yet all too often these tales are written about men and women are often seen not so much as individuals but in their relationship to men – as wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, slaves and so on, while the men get on with the important business which, all too often, means fighting other men. or, less so, carrying out great tasks.

Homer is very much a case in point. We do not know who Homer was. We do not know what sex Homer was. We do not know if Homer was one person or several people, with perhaps an original, possibly illiterate poet whose work was later transcribed and amended by one or more scribes. Most experts favour the latter theory and most experts think he/they was/were male. Andrew Dalby thinks Homer was a woman, though his views are not accepted by most scholars. Despite the fact that, in the Odyssey in particular, where Ulysses’ fate is often decided by a woman (Athena, Calypso, Nausicaa), in the Iliad the book is definitely a man’s book, not least because much of it is about men fighting and killing (albeit over a woman). In short, we almost entirely get the man’s point of view.

Pat Barker is best known for her World War I novels which do feature women but, because they are about war, tend to feature men much more. Her early works do feature women and the problems they have living in a bleak Northern English city. However, I am not sure that Barker would really be described as a feminist writer. However, in this book she takes The Iliad and looks at it from the women’s perspective, particularly the suffering the women have to endure during the Trojan War.

She starts off with a quote from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain which, more or less, sums up The Iliad: And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war.

Our heroine is Briseis. Before the Greeks attacked Troy, they fought and conquered Lyrnessus. Lyrnessus was a small settlement near Troy. Its exact location has not been determined. It was rule by King Mynes who was married to Briseis. The book starts with the attack of the Greeks on Lyrnessus. The Greeks have no difficulty in capturing the town and, once they do, they slaughter the men, loot the town and rape and enslave the women. We see all of this from Briseis’ point of view. She is captured by Achilles. She is his trophy.

Agamemnon is the king of the Greeks and hence commander in chief of the Greek army. He is not a very nice man. He had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to get a fair wind for Troy. (He will later pay the price for this as his wife, Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, is understandably not very happy about this. All this will happen well after the events in this book.). His trophy is Chryseis, who is very beautiful but seems to be about twelve years old.

Briseis, as Achilles’ slave, has various roles. In particular, of course, he uses her for rough sex. The Greek warriors do not seem big on the romantic approach to sex. She also prepares his meals, serves him and his friends and so on. While she does not suffer too much (if you do not consider being raped nightly too much), it is clearly a large step down from being a queen. However, she does observe the treatment of other women who suffer much more: used for sexual purposes by many men, beaten and often starved.

Chryses (who may be Briseis’ uncle) comes to the Greek camp to ransom his daughter. Agamemnon rejects him. Chryses is a priest of Apollo and he prays to Apollo for help. Things had been going well for the Greeks but then a plague strikes the camp. The rats die and then the men do. (Of course, it falls to the women to care for the sick men.). It is clear to everyone that Agamemnon’s refusal to ransom Chryseis is the reason as Apollo is offended by the insult to one of his priests. Finally and reluctantly, Agamemnon ransoms Chryseis. However, Agamemnon now does not have a trophy woman and he demands Briseis as his prize. Achilles has to hand her over but he is so insulted that he now refuses to fight any more, a big loss to the Greeks as he is by far their best fighter.

Briseis, of course, has no choice in the matter and becomes Agamemnon’s concubine. He has sex with her once but in a Bill-Clintonesque move, he will later deny having had sex with her as, using Barker’s delicate terminology, he uses the back door.

With Achilles out of the way, the Trojans gain the ascendant. (Note that neither of the two famous legends involved here – the Wooden Horse of Troy and Achilles’ death from a poisoned arrow in his ankle, his only vulnerable spot, occur in the Iliad but come from other sources, so they do not figure in this book, except for a passing mention about Achilles’ death.)

When Troy is finally captured, we learn of the Greeks’ plans from Briseis. Every man and boy killed – and that would include my brother-in- law – pregnant women to be speared in the belly on the off chance their child would be a boy, and for the other women, gang rape, beatings, mutilation, slavery. A few women – or rather a few very young girls, mainly of royal or aristocratic birth – would be shared out among the kings. Briseis had been returned to Achilles before his death but is now, after his death, passed to someone else.

Barker (re)tells the story of the Iliad well, not least because we see what happens from the point of view of Briseis. While she describes the fighting, some of which she sees and some of which she learns about, as the dead and wounded are brought back to the camp. For a man, all of it would be seen either as a glorious victory (if you are on the winning side) or a terrible tragedy (if you are on the losing side). For Briseis, it is all horrible. While being grief-stricken at the loss of her family and friends, both in Lyrnessus and Troy, she does not exult when the Greeks are being beaten, even though she clearly supports the Trojans (her sister is married to one and is in Troy). She has a certain sympathy for the Greeks suffering from wounds or from the plague. She comments on Achilles’ many scars with a degree of concern.

However, above all, we see the role of women compared to the role of men. The women are, of course, wives, mothers, sisters and so on. However, once they are defeated and captured, they cease to be human but become chattels. They are there for sex, of course, but also to wait on the men, to nurse them when ill or wounded, to prepare their food and drink, to comfort them and to wash the dead. In short, the men need the women. Even the great Achilles goes running to Mummy for comfort (she is on one of the ships).

We also see that the men are vulgar, aggressive, drunkards, violent (and not just towards the enemy) and abusive. Few have any redeeming features. Barker makes a strong comparison with the women, the women as victims, but also the women as nurses, as mothers, as carers, as comforters. While Barker is referring to the 11th-12th centuries B.C. (the era when the Trojan War might have taken place), she may well also be pointing out that men have not made much improvement in the three thousand years since. The book takes its title from a comment Barker makes near the end: Silence becomes a woman …, a view, she is clearly saying, many men subscribe to.

There is no doubt that this is really a fascinating novel. If you are familiar with the Iliad, it will be interesting to see the events of the book seen from an entirely different perspective. If you are not particular familiar with Iliad, you will learn of the events Homer describes but not in the way Homer describes them.

I’m a sucker for retellings of familiar stories, so this had me from the start. It’s a retelling do the Trojan war through the eyes of Briseis, a character who’s point of view has not been shown in literature.

I thought his book was excellent. It explores its themes of slavery and the treatment of women perfectly and I was hooked from start to finish

First things, first. The Silence of the Girls is the best book that I have read so far this year.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we call him ‘the butcher’.

Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

Not bad for an opening paragraph and the book just gets better. Pat Barker has set about retelling The Iliad. Only this time instead of seeing the story told from the men’s point of view we look through a 19 year old girl’s eyes. Briseis, Queen of Lyrnessus has been taken captive after the Greek’s sacked her city, she has been given to Achilles as his prize of honour. He has killed her brothers and her husband and now she must sleep with him.

The Silence of the Girls is all about war. It goes on all around us but apart from watching the sacking of Lyrnessus from the high walls of its citadel we never see any fighting. Once they are captured the women never leave the camp, they can hear the battle, but see it. They tend the dying, dress the dead but never set foot on the field of battle itself.

Briseis appears in The Iliad we see her given to Achilles, we see Agamemnon take her and the pair feud over her. We don’t, however see the other captive women. The Silence of the Girls shows us life in the rape camps. Women do have a choice, they can sleep with their captors or die. And yet, and yet. Achilles does not seem to be a total monster. Agamemnon is awful, but then he is awful in The Iliad too. This is a retelling of the tale for the #MeToo generation and yet Pat Barker must have started writing it before the hashtag.

This is a story that has been told over and over again for thousands of years. Chances are that you will have a seen a film based on the book, maybe read The Iliad itself and if not, then the tale of Helen of Troy will have wafted past at some point. Even though you know what is going to happen, I sat up long into the night reading just one more page. Now the search is on, will I read a better book this year?

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Published by Penguin
Hardback £18.99, Kindle £9.99
Seeking inspiration for your next read? Check out my Best Books 2017 post

Disclosure: The Silence of the Girls was sent to me via NetGalley in return for an honest review

I went into this story having never read either Homer's The Iliad or anything by Pat Barker. However, that didn't stop me from being instantly captivated by this retelling.

The Silence of the Girls is told from the perspective of former queen Briseis who is captured and descends to become Achilles' prize of war. In grand epics, women have no opinion, they have no power, they have no voice. However, Barker fills this vacuum and offers readers a new perspective of the story and its brutal heroes. Briseis becomes an unknowing catalyst for Troy's eventual downfall with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, and Barker succeeds in telling her side of the story. She writes of the sexual and psychological abuse which is so often normalised in male-dominant stories and by no means romanticises their suffering.

"She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can’t possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all."

The reason I gave this story 4 stars was down to the jarring shift of perspectives. After the first part, the story begins telling the overarching story of the heroes and the shift from first to the third perspective comes without warning.

Nonetheless, the intercut of Briseis' account with that of Achilles' is interesting. He's not only a brutal warrior but a complex and troubled man. It's as if a part of him has died as he experiences the overwhelming anguish at the death of Patroclus. Briseis' anger and grief, swallowed down and unvoiced, is therefore juxtaposed with Achilles' own violent outpouring, consumed by conflict.

Barker's comparisons don't stop here. We identify a contrast between the vulgar talk of male characters and the quieter conversations between women. She explores not only the brutal battlefield of war but the paralleling battlefield located in the hospital tents, sleeping quarters, spaces women inhabit.
She juxtaposes the lavish tapestries, grand feasts and gold plates with the overcrowded huts and rats, ultimately leading to the plague.

All of this captures the nature of the epic as well as the quiet moments of beauty, as she brings the Greek encampment to life. The story ends with a glimmer of hope, Briseis is a survivor. She stayed strong throughout her suffering rather than throwing herself off a cliff to save her virtue, as was the case for other women. This was a quick read for me, instantly gripped by the lyrical language. This is a song of grief, anger and survival. You don't need prior knowledge of Homer's epic before reading this stunning story and I recommend everyone gives this retelling a read.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin UK for my advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a partial retelling of the Iliad. Part of the story is told by Briseis, a princess whose town fell to the Greeks. All the men were killed and the women taken as slaves.
Briseis was then given to Achilles as a war prize. It tells of what it feels like to lose one's home and family and then have to serve those who are responsible for this.
Interweaved with this is the story of Achilles told from a third-person perspective.
It is a well-written book which tells the story from the perspective of the women on the losing side..

I thought The Silence Of The Girls was quite outstanding. I wasn’t sure whether I would like it, but it turned out to be readable, insightful, humane and by the end was utterly spellbinding.

(If spoiler warnings are needed for a famous 2500-year-old story, be aware that I make reference below to some events in the book.)

This is the story of the end of the Trojan War from the perspective of Briseis, a Trojan noblewoman captured in battle and given to Achilles as a prize of honour. Largely narrated by Briseis herself, this is a brilliant portrait of what it is to be captured and to become someone’s property; to be referred to as “it”, to be silent and perform domestic duties, to be paraded in front of the men as a prize and to be forced to have sex with the man who killed her brothers and destroyed her home. There is also an excellent picture of the reality of the fighting and of the Greek camp on the plains of Troy, and it is all done in a wonderfully human, readable voice so it never becomes turgid or worthy. As a tiny example, of Achilles’s legendary invulnerability, “Invulnerable to wounds? His whole body was a mass of scars. Believe me, I do know.”

Much of the book is, of course, the story of Achilles and it’s a wonderfully insightful study of a proud, emotionally illiterate warrior’s reaction to insult and then to grief. The almost adolescent sulking and its effect are evoked with real understanding, the death of Patroclus is superbly done and very moving, and the portrait of Achilles’s grief and rage quite enthralling. We get a chilling picture of what his subsequent “heroism” on the battlefield really means, and the visit of Priam to plead for Hector’s body was both deeply touching and utterly gripping with Briseis’s voice and perspective binding it all together.

I was hooked from quite early in the book and for the closing third I was completely enthralled.

I think that Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy is among the finest literary achievements of the last half century, so I don’t speak lightly when I say that The Silence Of The Girls is one of her very best. I very much hope that it will be a contender for major literary prizes and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via Netgalley.)

I wanted to love this but sadly I didn’t, I wanted more women. and less Achilles, I just expected more from Pat Barker retelling the Iliad from the women’s point of view. Why couldn’t there have been a chapter or two from inside Troy from Helen or Cassandra? But it was still mostly about Achilles and Patroclus, a story I feel we all know too well already.

Pat Barker brings the time of the Trojan wars to life in a beautifully written novel. Told from the viewpoints of Briseis (a princess captured by the Greeks and given to Achilles as a slave) and Achilles, the book tells the story of the conquest of Troy by the Greek armies.
It is a compelling read, which does not shy away from the gruesome details and brutality of warfare, yet manages to portray even the fiercest warriors as human.
A really good book - read it!

The Silence of the Girls is a fabulous book. History is traditionally written and told by the victors; this is a story told by the victims. During the nine year long Trojan war, Achilles and his Myrmidon warriors sack the city of Lyrnessus. All its' men die that day. Briseis, the King's young wife, is given as a prize to Achilles. This book is her story.
Briseis is treated with relative kindness by Achilles, who is painted as a brilliant fighter but a petulant child. Agamemnon is a brutal and petty man. The whole premise of the war can be reduced to bruised egos. Most if the women are not as ‘lucky' as Briseis. Agamemnon’s ‘prize' brings a curse upon the camp. A wedge is driven between him and Achilles that nearly loses them the war.
Achilles tells Briseis he wishes he had never met her. The only man to show Briseis any kindness is Patroclus. The genius of this story is in the telling. Briseis’s story is one that is never usually told. She knows her life has changed forever, as a result of being on the losing side. The main events of the war are heard after the fact, as if on a newsreel. All of this is taken out on the women. The men are only interested in how it affects them.
The story is so easy to read, unlike The Iliad that is based on. Pat Barker's inclusion of some modern idioms makes this book accessible to a much wider audience. It would make an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the Classics.

The female Troy... readable literary version for a MeToo world.

There have been many versions/rewrites of classic stories over the years, the Penelopiad and The Song of Achilles just two of this one particular epic. Never will a female account feel more relevant.

In an account of armies of men fighting over a woman, "a girl really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war," with female prisoners of war taken and 'distributed' among the victors, we watch the deeds of Achilles and Patroclus, Agamemnon and Hector through the eyes of a Queen of a sacked city, taken into slavery and presented to Achilles as his prize.

Briseis shows us the side of ancient history we have not been given insight into - the women did not write chronicles, did not figure in important activities, have never been given a voice in history.

Having read The Iliad, as well as the versions above, I found this the most readable of the lot. It doesn't sugarcoat the more unpleasant aspects of being taken as a prisoner of war - the subjugation, rape, starvation, violence against the women, all whilst grieving for murdered loved ones. Barker also doesn't place any of the traditional heroes on a pedestal - Achilles has more than the one reputed weakness, and we see the men in all their sweaty, realistic glory.
"They're the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don't seem to see our battles - of they prefer not to."

Briseis talks to us about her world, changed from palace to kept bed-girl, a trophy who must "spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers." It's horrific when you see it in this light. The story of Troy has never included these details.

We still get to see the story of Troy that we know, that of Hector, of Achilles the hero, of his best friend and confidante Patroclus, but without the rose tint. War is brutal, the men controlling it brutal in the heat of it.

I enjoyed the feel of time and place that Barker presented, and also the low-lying eroticism in Achilles' scenes with both Briseis and Patroclus, with relationships developing slowly through the book. And Briseis is a fighter, an observer, a survivor. We are allowed through her to see the other ignored, unexceptional females in the Greek camp and understand through the snippets of camp life we see know what life was like for the half of the population seen as little more than material goods.

For anyway who knows the story, the ending won't be much of a surprise, but the way Barker writes the segment was impressive, giving the 'bigger' story very little page space and detail, after all "his story... ends at his grave" and for those not there to witness it, what can be said? It was rather refreshing not to have a big battle scene, though I did wonder about the lack of mention of the Trojan Horse, especially as one scene mentions a toy that I thought might signify a plan to come - is the Horse a fabrication then of how the Trojan War ended?

An excellent insight into women's history, the history that was never recorded. Famous events as those watching from the sidelines saw them, and the background stories they might have lived and fought themselves.

My first Pat Barker, and not my last.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing an advance reading copy.

An enjoyable book about the time of Achilles and Aggamemnon at the time of the Trojan war, but told mainly from the point of a captured queen who becomes a slave/ concubine to Achilles. An interesting perspective on a long and bloody war, which cost Achilles his life.

I was sent a copy of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker to read and review by NetGalley.
This was my first foray into the writing of Pat Barker. I really liked her mature style of writing and it was great to read a story mainly told from a woman’s point of view. The relationships between the characters were well drawn and quite believable and I was able to visualise the locations and feel the emotions of the ‘players’, with some passages being quite extraordinary. Though I was engrossed in the story and wanted to keep reading there is something that is holding me back from giving it the full 5 stars – if I was able to give 4½ I would do so. I can’t quite put my finger on why this is, but I would still recommend this novel as a really good read!

A spell-binding account of the events leading to the Battle of Troy. This could have been just another retelling of the heroes' actions as they unfolded but Barker has chosen to tell this from the viewpoint of Achilles' concubine, making it more personal and humbler.
Barker's blunt descriptions convey very successfully the girl's raw feelings and emotions, painting for the reader a picture of the frustrations of war and its knock-on effects. However, whilst I assume Barker intends for us to experience the feminist angle, I felt she over-stresses this at times - the way she tells her story drives home the message successfully enough.

A definite recommendation for greek mythology fans and historical fiction readers alike. An account to make us look more closely at the 'heroes' of that time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Random House UK) for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

A feminist retelling of the Iliad through the voice of Briseis who had been in a queen in her own rite but witnessed the slaying of her husband and family. She was shipped off and was chosen by Achilles to be his bed mate or concubine and slave. There are no holds barred in describing how the women were treated or enslaved in what is termed as a “rape camp”. The horrors of war, looting, drunken revelry and a plague of rats are vividly portrayed. I’m not sure if the use of modern slang terms and the odd anachronism add or detract from the telling.
Barker presents a strong and vivid alternative viewpoint on a traditional tale where the Gods are supreme and the only noted women were goddesses. Here the real women shine through.

Loved this. Pat Barker is back! Refreshing perspective for a Greek myth, and not dry at all - a page turner.

I went into this book intrigued to find out how Pat Barker dealt with this fresh retelling of The Iliad. I definitely wasn’t disappointed, the story held my attention throughout and I did enjoy reading the story from Briseis’s point of view.

The story shows how these great wars which are normally told from the man’s point of view are seen so differently from the woman’s. Briseis, a queen of a neighbouring kingdom to Troy, is given to Achilles as his prize. She tells of her fear and anger, of the waste of lives and the way the women who become slaves and prizes cope with their new situation. As the book progresses Achilles also has a voice, and I loved seeing his character change as the war progressed. The brutality of war is so well written, as in Pat Barker’s other books; there is no glossing over what happens.

I did find it a little slow to get into but by the end, I was totally engrossed. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this extremely well written story.

Pat Barker takes us to the end days of the Trojan war, with a re-telling from the point of view of the women there. This is the story of Briseis, and through her, all the women caught up in wars - women with limited power, women with no control over their fates.

Barker tells a story of complex relationships. Briseis is pragmatic, angry but accepting. She goes from being a princess to being a slave to the greatest warrior of them all.. The social hierarchy is overturned, for all the women involved.

The heroes in this book are real people. There's an air of the WWI officer's mess in places - Achilles as the doomed fighter pilot? - there are negotiations and arguments. The pressure of the endless war, the endless siege - which keeps the besieging as imprisoned as the besieged- leads to personal feuds getting way out of control. This doesn't feel anachronistic at all - for me, it showed the universal nature of war. The hospital tent is how I imagine any hospital tent could be - pre-antibiotics, at any rate - conjuring up Vera Brittain and Hawkeye Pierce would both have felt at home there.

Through it all, the women watch, hang on in there, tolerate, survive. They talk among themselves, they share secrets, they develop complex relationships with their captors. They have children. They pass on their own songs and stories to their foreign offspring.

I read this book in an olive grove in Croatia, reminded that there was a war there not so very long ago, when rape was deliberately used as a weapon. Maybe myths survive because they are universal?

I thought I knew my Greek myths pretty well, and it was shaming to think that I knew this story, but had never really thought about it from a female perspective. This fits well in the tradition of re-tellings from a different perspective - and Barker brings her knowledge of conditions in WWI to bear here extremely successfully. I'm so glad I read this book.

Wonderful book, probably one of the best books I have read this year! Pat Barker's retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of the women makes for a fascinating read. The modern idioms used by the men stand out in stark contrast to the almost lyrical language used by the women making the contrast between victor and captive even starker. The descriptions of the of rotting rubbish, piled so high it feels claustrophobic and the deforestation of the plain before Troy so that there is insufficient wood for Hectors' funeral pyre feel like a nod to very modern problems.