This was a decent retelling of The Iliad from a different perspective and for a modern audience. I suppose that my issue with it lay mostly in the attempt at contemporary speech. I almost dreaded conversation between characters because the dialogue seemed so very out of place in what is still a very traditional tale. What I did enjoy were the more reflective moments and relationships between characters, both explained and alluded to. There were also beautiful instances of poetry and prose that for me were a delight, describing Achilles mostly both in battle and his more private moments. Briseis is also a sympathetic character, both in her resignation to her fate as a woman in wartime but occasional flares of defiance and strength. While I would have loved to see more representation of the Greek gods and goddesses I still found myself entertained by this book and found the pacing interesting enough that I finished it very quickly.

Here's the thing, I love Greek mythology, but in an abstract sort of way: I tried to read some of the myths when I was a child but they were a bit too dry, and I've been part way through The Illiad all summer. But retellings, ah, they're a different matter!

I LOVE this book. Giving voice to the voiceless female slaves of The Illiad was always going to be my jam, and Pat Barker does it exceptionally well. You might be able to gloss over the realities of life for the captured women in the original by Homer, but here it's laid out for you with brutal clarity.

First they witness the slaughter of their menfolk, then the slaves and lower class women are raped by the invading soldiers, then the higher class women (and any who survived the initial onslaught) are taken as slaves. Some of the women are given as 'prizes' to high ranking officers, and some of those will be bed slaves, which is exactly what it sounds like.

This is how Briseis, a former queen, ends up in the household of Achilles and Patroclus, and this is her story - from her capture just before Achilles and Agamemnon have their falling out, to the fall of Troy. As a narrator she is by turns angry, sorrowful, stoic, and wry, but her story is gripping and I raced through it. This book was beautifully written, and the story was everything I wanted Circe to be. I'm so glad I've read it.

I should declare a growing obsession with variants and offshoots of the Iliad and Odyssey. I’ve had a copy of each on my shelf for years now, but apart from the odd glance, that’s largely where they have remained, spines unbroken and pages pristine. A few years back, I studied a little of the Iliad as part of an OU module. Of course I have seen Troy, and have listened to radio adaptations of Electra (further proof of Kristin Scott-Thomas’ genius) and The Oresteia. A subscription to Audiobooks means I have now listened to the Iliad and Odyssey in their entirety, almost 30 hours all told (but in the company of the dulcet tones of Anton Lesser, time passes swiftly). That has really helped me put my ducks in a row, to determine which parts of the mythology come direct from Homer and which from elsewhere. I even managed to put Odysseus’ travels home from Troy into chronological order.
I read Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles a couple of years ago on a friend’s recommendation, and really enjoyed it. I’m eagerly anticipating her Circe. I’ve recently listened to Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, expertly told by three actors in the parts of Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. It worked really well, emphasising the different narrators’ voices used in the book.
I’ve long been fascinated by adaptations of books. Far from the view of some who say that a certain film or television version has ‘ruined’ the book (I’ve never understood that; the original remains unsullied, the new work just adds to the canon), I enjoy observing the differences and similarities between source material and adaptation, and between different adaptations. Was a particular change made purely for the medium, or was it an artistic choice? It’s not always a case of a screenwriter riding roughshod over the author’s work: I’ve just watched Jaws after listening to it on Book at Bedtime. There were loads of changes but the book’s author Peter Benchley cowrote the screenplay. Was he bound by studio or agent demands – was killing off Richard Dreyfus’ character a step too far? Did he decide to drop some storylines for simplicity (Mrs Brody’s affair with Hooper, and the antagonism between Chief Brody and Hooper) and make other changes to fit the medium (seeing as little as possible of the fish)? Or did he work in plot points that he had pondered when writing the book? How does the choice of an actor in a particular role change the character or the dynamic of the story? It’s the same interest I find in historical fiction. Where has the author stuck rigidly to known facts and speculated around them, and where has a deliberate deviation from history been made?
I read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy a long time ago but I remember how much I thought of it; more recently I have seen the film and listened to the Radio 4 play. So the combination of an author I admire and a subject I fangirl over means I have been looking forward to The Silence of the Girls for a while now. You can imagine my delight at having the opportunity to read it ahead of publication. Barker does not hang about. In the first few pages, we are plunged into a city under siege: the Greeks are approaching the gates of Lyrnessus. By the end of the first chapter, we have a good idea of what Briseis has already had to endure in this place.
Briseis knows what is happening to her is awful, will be awful perhaps for the rest of her life. But she bears it with steeliness, deciding that she will not, cannot take her own life. The battle rages on but is kept offstage for most of the book. Instead we are in the Greek camp, among the women, and see their relationships with each other, and their different responses to the situation into which they have been forced.
Each of the principal characters is recognizable from what has gone before, but they have been given other traits, too: Achilles is a little boy desperately missing his mother as well as a hotheaded warrior; Patroclus reveals that he was calmed by Achilles, not just the other way around; Helen is a skilled weaver; Priam is fond of children.
I was completely drawn into Briseis’ world. I was rooting for her and for the other women in the Greek camp. That I read this over just two evenings tells you all you need to know. I urge you to read it. Soon.

"Silence becomes a woman."

It's wonderful when you can genuinely say in a review that it was a privilege to have been given the opportunity to read a book.

Having not read any of Pat Barker's previous work, I was not sure what to expect. I had not expected to be blown away by an absolute tour de force of a novel: well-written in its direct simplicity and yet, at the same time poetic and deeply moving. Trauma is captured so brutally on the page here. Yes, this is a story of Briseis, lover of Achilles (for it is HIS story, as we are reminded) but this is no love story. The way Barker writes about loss and grief cuts to the quick.

There are no punches pulled - the description of the plague of rats in the camp had my face absolutely contorted, as did the deaths of men and the rape of women. All such descriptions are plentiful.

Briseis is outwardly subservient and inwardly a modern feminist and it is this push/pull that really drives the novel. Given where we are at with a number of issues regarding women's rights, this is an important book - an allegory for modern readers.

If this work doesn't win literary awards, it will be an absolute travesty.

Highly recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Books UK, Hamish Hamilton and Pat Barker for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. It is well written and the descriptions bring the scenes to life. The facts in the story match with things that I have read previously. I would have given it 5 stars but for a part in the middle where I got a bit bogged down. Felt that the horror and terror of the battle and the despair of the slaves was made very clear.
The story is written from a different perspective. Rather than being about Helen of Troy, or one of the other main characters, it is written from the point. of view of a princess captured and kept as a slave which added to the interest for me.
I thoroughly recommend it

In The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker sets out to give voice to the women ‘silenced’ in previous versions of the story of the Trojan War. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she entirely succeeds. It all starts promisingly as the reader experiences the fall of Lyrnessus to the Greek army, commanded by Agamemnon, through the eyes of Briseis, wife of King Mynes. The horror of the battle, the dreadful consequences of defeat for the female inhabitants of the city in particular and the aftermath of the battle are evocatively described.

After the fall of the city, Briseis and noble women like her are ‘awarded’ to leading figures in the Greek army in the manner of battle honours or prizes of war. Because of her status, youth and beauty, Briseis is allocated to the legendary warrior, Achilles, becoming his slave and, effectively, his possession. Briseis wryly notes that in some cases individual women’s lives are changed for the better following their capture if, that is, they possess youth, beauty and fertility. ‘One girl, who’d been a slave in Lyrnessus – and a kitchen slave at that, the lowest of the low – was now the concubine of a great lord, while her mistress, a plain, slack-bellied woman near the end of her childbearing years, had to scratch and scrape for food around the fires.’

Surprised and unaccustomed to being on public view and unveiled when serving at Achilles’ table, Briseis eventually realises why he is happy for her to be seen by his comrades. ‘Nobody wins a trophy and hides it at the back of a cupboard. You want it where it can be seen, so that other men will envy you.’ The use of the word ‘it’ is relevant as, throughout the book, the author sheds light on the way the women are treated as objects.

For example, when Agamemnon later demands Briseis be handed over to him, Achilles’ anger is at being deprived of what he believes is rightfully his. ‘She’s his prize, that’s all, his prize of honour, no more, no less. It’s nothing to do with the actual girl.’ His response to this perceived dishonour will have far-reaching and tragic consequences. Later Briseis observes, ‘Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men’. For example, messages that demonstrate their status or their ability to wield power over others.

In parts two and three of the book, however, Briseis’ first hand narrative is interspersed with sections from the point of view of Achilles. Given his pivotal role in subsequent events and his strange heritage (his father, Peleus, is a mortal but his mother is a sea goddess), I found the power of his unfolding story rather took over the book, especially when it comes to the intense relationship between Achilles and his friend, Patroclus. Effectively, I felt Briseis was being silenced again. This was underlined for me when Briseis notes, ‘Once, not so long ago, I tried to walk out of Achilles’ story – and failed. Now, my own story can begin.’ These are the last lines of the book.

The book does assume the reader has some prior knowledge of the story of The Trojan War and its key characters. I had a little but not enough to recognise all the characters, their relationships or their role in the story. I think a dramatis personae would be a really helpful addition to the book. I wanted to love The Silence of the Girls and feel thrilled from beginning to end at witnessing the story of the clever, resourceful and resilient Briseis through her eyes and those of other women. Instead I found that, although I could admire the skilful writing, I felt slightly disappointed at the end, that my high expectations had not been met.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, Hamish Hamilton, and NetGalley, in return for an honest and unbiased review. (3.5 stars)

My thanks to Penguin U.K. for the opportunity to read and review this novel in advance.

The story of Briseis and her role in the Trojan War has always fascinated me and so I welcomed this powerful novel by Pat Barker that gives an opportunity to Briseis and other silent voices of the women caught up in this conflict to be known.

From the outset with the conquest of her home it is a brutal tale with details of the bloody battle and the consequences that face the women in the aftermath. Briseis herself is awarded as a slave to Achilles as a prize of war. It is not a romanticised tale as some depictions of their relationship has been yet does have growth.

The events of the Iliad, including Briseis’ role in shaping the tide of the war when Agamemnon demands create a rift between he and Achilles, the deaths of Patroclus and Hector, King Priam’s visit and the final sacking of Troy, are experienced through Briseis’ eyes alongside daily life in the Greek camp. Some chapters do change to third person, allowing other perspectives.

I deeply appreciated the way in which the characters relationships with the gods were depicted keeping with the beliefs of the times rather than distancing from them as some writers of historical fiction do.

I found it a strong, compelling novel written in a beautiful, lyrical style that compliments its source material. Its battle scenes are savage and convey the horrors of war.

I feel certain that it will not only be popular with readers but be a strong contender for upcoming literary prizes.

Despite offering a much-needed portrait of the Iliad’s forgotten women, Pat Barker’s feminist take on the Greek epic still fails to convince.

The gods might have promised Achilles eternal glory, but it’s a different story for the young queen he enslaved. No longer simply a cipher on the margins of an epic tale, here Briseis rises above the violence and abuse that dominated her life to become the protagonist of her own story, and in doing so reveals the brutal reality that lay behind the Greek victory at Troy.

Although treading well-worn ground, The Silence of the Girls succeeds in offering a fairly fresh look at both the heroes of Greek myth, and the women they brutalised. From the very first lines, Barker strives to present an original interpretation of Achilles in particular, with his usual epithets of “great”, “brilliant” and “godlike” challenged by our main character Briseis. “We never called him any of those things,” she remarks, coldly. “We called him ‘the butcher’.”

Butcher he undoubtedly appears in Barker’s retelling, as well as perpetrator of terrible sexual violence: the writer doesn’t shy away from the cruel truth of what happened to the Trojan women, and indeed much of the plot revolves around their plight. In placing their suffering centre-stage, Barker lends their ordeal gravitas; with a judicious eye for description she details sexual assault in lucid, articulate prose which never allows any scene of rape to become gratuitous.

But while this deft touch grants a certain eloquence to the novel’s most harrowing scenes, on other occasions Barker’s exposition seems clunky, almost clumsy – nowhere more so than in the frequent attempts to include modern idiom in her dialogue. This predilection for a present-day vernacular is not a problem in and of itself, and in fact can sometimes be quite effective. Achilles’ laddish response to accepting Briseis as his war prize, complete with callous remark of “Cheers, lads. She’ll do”, is a rare example of how contemporary slang, when used correctly, is powerful even in its jarring anachronism, serving here to evoke a thoroughly modern sexism.

It is, however, the continual use of these phrases, the graceless, constant reliance on exclamations like “Oh, c’mon”, “Spot on”, and “OK!”, which breaks up otherwise beautifully-written passages, and destroys the narrative flow. As a result, this slang-heavy dialogue loses any impact it might once have had, bowing as it does under the weight of its own solecistic inclusion.

This lack of selection, and indeed precision, is equally apparent when it comes to the novel’s main ideas. Barker appears to present so many different facets of feminist theory in The Silence of the Girls as to lose focus on any single one; concepts are proffered to the reader in one chapter before being undermined in the next. Protagonist Briseis embodies this confusion: she is a proud, clever woman despite her enslavement, but this pride and intelligence never seem to translate fully into a celebration of her own womanhood. More often than not, this pride is simply used as an expression of her own distaste for the other women in the camp.

There is, it should be said, nothing wrong with having a protagonist whom the reader often finds unlikeable, especially when this lead role is taken by a woman. Barker’s portrayal of Briseis could have been an important contribution to the oft-neglected representation of so-called “difficult women”. But Briseis seems so underdeveloped as a character that even when she begins to understand the other women in the camp, the reader still feels cheated. The vague hint of her burgeoning insight remains, like the overall message of the novel, merely the suggestion of an idea.

For all its feminist credentials, there just seems something missing in Barker’s retelling of perhaps this most famous of tales. Despite its predominantly female cast, it still feels like no one woman in the story is ever allowed to shine.

The conundrum of how to give the neglected women of the Iliad a voice equal to that of the ever-dominant Achilles must remain, for now, unsolved.

(Thank you so much to Penguin Books UK for offering me the chance to review this book; I received a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review).

A story of the fall of Troy from the eyes of Briseis who went from Queen to concubine to Achilles the man who slaughtered her Husband and Brothers. These were brutal times that she lived but still each person was a life that held emotion and as much as they tried to hide it it is a fact that all of us experience and one that Pat Baker has brought to life. How does a fierce man with animal like qualities that lets him kill at will with no thought to those that he makes to depart from life as he just goes forward to the next he savagely ends his life to. Yet at night is a man who feasts then sings while enjoying the company of friends as would you and I, but the songs will be different if you sing and the didn't have TV or computers with Netflix that lets you watch the action with different eyes because your life is not at stake.
This is a well and beautifully written account of how the ladies of this time fair not just emotions but the truth and denials they face just to survive from Queen to Slave the action behind the battle field can be just as raw. The of field battles where pretty arguements are allowed to festa while men died. Can you support those that destroyed your past because this is their life now and the men once your enemies are now well I will let you read and see for yourself.
I do highly recommend this book and hope you are as captured by it as I was. Thanks to penguin books (UK) 🐧 and NetGalley for my copy.

Pat Barker has written about the final days of the siege of Troy (the Iliad) in the voices of both Achilles and Briseis - their thoughts and feelings and doings. It is beautifully written in an almost third person stance but very evocative. I really cared about them and even though I know the Iliad I found this a really interesting and enjoyable way to relive a good story.

There have been a number of novels published recently which look at Greek myths and legends from a feminine perspective. In the last few months I have enjoyed reading Circe by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the witch Circe from the Odyssey, and For the Immortal by Emily Hauser, the story of Hippolyta the Amazon queen. Pat Barker’s new novel, The Silence of the Girls is another, this time bringing to life the character of Briseis and the events of Homer’s Iliad.

When the city of Lyrnessus falls to the Greeks during the Trojan War, Briseis loses her husband, King Mynes, and her father and brothers. The surviving women are shared out amongst the Greek conquerors as prizes of war and Briseis finds that she is given to the great warrior Achilles as a slave. The events which follow, such as the quarrel which breaks out between Achilles and Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, over the possession of Briseis, and the fate of Patroclus when he impersonates Achilles on the battlefield, will already be known to anyone familiar with the Iliad. If all of this is new to you, though, don’t worry – no knowledge of Homer’s epic is necessary and Pat Barker makes it very easy to follow what is happening.

Most of the novel is narrated by Briseis herself and I found her a very engaging narrator. The nature of her story and the ordeals she faces make her an easy character to sympathise with; I was given a good understanding of how she felt about losing her freedom, becoming a slave and being at the mercy of the men responsible for murdering her family and destroying her city. This is quite a dark novel and Barker doesn’t hold back when describing the brutality of the men in the Greek army, both on and off the battlefield.

I was surprised to find that there are also some chapters written from the perspective of Achilles, who is very much the villain of the book. Although seeing Achilles’ side of the story certainly didn’t make me warm to him at all, it was good to get a different point of view, especially as it allowed us to see scenes and hear conversations that took place when Briseis was not present. However, because of the title of the book, I think it would have been nice if more female characters had been given a voice so that the silence of more than just one girl could be broken. We do meet some of the other women in the Greek camp, but only through Briseis’ eyes and Briseis is the only one we get to know in any depth.

I did really enjoy this book, though. It’s well written, very readable, and a fascinating portrayal of Ancient Greek society.

In Homer’s Iliad, women do not speak very often, except maybe for the goddesses, and Briseis, the central character of Barker’s novel, has no words at all.

”’Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.”

Here Barker retells the story but from Briseis’ perspective, giving Briseis a voice but also allowing a view into the lives of other women in the story. What we get is a new view of a well-known story that focuses on the damage war does to those left behind. In the Iliad, women are seen as trophies, taken when a battle is won and the men have been killed and given as rewards or traded when needs be

”And I brought up the rear, along with the seven girls from Lesbos, and all the other things.”

What we see is women surviving slavery whilst at the same time witnessing or waiting to hear of the death of their loved ones - husbands, bothers, sons.

Other reviewers have pointed out that there are some anachronisms in Barker’s storytelling. She makes reference to weekend markets in a time before the weekend was invented. She talks of “half a crown” which meant nothing in that time and place. But that doesn’t necessarily take away from the emotion that she is able to communicate. From the blurb and from the opening chapters, you can be forgiven for thinking this is simply going to be Briseis’ story. But Barker soon starts to take breaks from the first person narration to skip to events that Briseis could not have seen told by a third person narrator. A large part of the story becomes an interpretation of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus that concentrates on the “bromance” and potential sexual side of that relationship. And there are significant passages about Achilles’ relationship with his mother. It has to be said that the Achilles presented in Barker’s book is weaker and far more vulnerable that the traditional view and she also seems to have no real interested in the idea of his invulnerability (his death here is not, well, probably not, by a poisoned arrow in the heel). So, if you pick this up thinking it is Briseis’ story and nothing else, you have some surprises coming.

This mixing of viewpoints is both a weakness and a strength of the novel. Part of me wishes the narrative had stayed with Briseis all the time and that other events had been included as Briseis learned about them and reacted to them. But, at the same time, the portrayal of Achilles and two of his most important relationships is a fascinating parallel story.

This book has been billed as a “feminist Iliad” and I can see where that comes from. Briseis (and other women in the story) struggle to escape from male-dominated stories:

”Looking back, it seemed to me I’d been trying to escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles’ story; and I’d failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story - his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn’t matter. Here I was again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no part to play in it.”

And as we end (I can say this as you can’t really spoil a story this old), Achilles has died and Briseis heads to a new life:

”Once, not so long ago, I tried to walk out of Achilles’ story - and failed. Now my own story begins.”

But the “feminist Iliad” is an interesting topic. It’s phrase pulled from a review in The Guardian, but other reviewers have commented that this is not a feminist rewrite: Briseis knows and accepts her lesser role in her society. I’m thinking this through because I didn’t think of it as a feminist re-write as I read it, but thinking back over the book and reading other reviews makes me wonder.

Overall, a book that is far more complex than I imagined it would be from the blurb, with more exploration of Achilles than I expected and with food for thought at the end.

My thanks to Penguin Books (UK) for a review copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

It is hard to take a well-known tale and tell it afresh but Pat Barker accomplishes this in The Silence of the Girls, which is a retelling of the spat between Achilles and Agamemnon at the siege of Troy from the point of view of the captured slave girl Briseis who was central to their dispute. Taking a stance of history from below Barker sets out to give an account from the viewpoint of one of the many women who saw their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons killed and were then used as sex slaves by the very men who had slaughtered them.

It is a compelling read and I finished it in two sittings. She does succeed in presenting Briseis' viewpoint, mostly from a first person narrative, but I've given it 4 rather than 5 stars as this is sometimes quite clunky and rather rammed down the readers' throat. So we have a long list of those killed by Achilles in battle and how they died, and the ending of the book spells out the central message of 'other stories' far too explicitly.

Although Briseis says that she remembers the women much more than the men it is just the men who emerge as the most interesting in this novel - troubled Achilles, with mother issues, petulant and petty Agamemnon and compassionate Patroclus.

Despite this it's a very good re-telling of this story with some different insights and I do recommend it.

YAY A NEW PAT BARKER BOOK. Gosh, she's just brilliant. I could live in her writing all day and never leave - this is so different to her other books that I've read, but I loved every minute.

This was a very enjoyable read. I found I was instantly drawn to the characters and their stories. This book was full of suspense from start to finish.

Normally, I only give 5-star ratings out to books I'm going to read over, and over, and over again. But I probably won't ever again touch The Silence of the Girls. Not because it was bad, but the opposite: it was too good. I felt like I was mourning and despairing and struggling and fighting alongside Briseis herself, and that's not something I want to go through again.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with an overview of the...

PLOT

This book covers my most beloved story in all of classical literature - the tale of Achilles, 'half beast, half god,' and his faithful companion Patroclus. It's not really their story though. Not as such. It's the tale of Briseis, once the wife and daughter of kings, now a slave-girl plucked out by Achilles as his war prize and a bone of contention between him and Agamemnon.

Super unpopular opinion: I don't believe classics and mythology can really be spoiled... Yeah, I know, literally everyone disagrees with me. Sorry. STOP READING NOW if you don't want to know that Achilles and Patroclus both die, the former avenging the latter's death, leaving Briseis to be pawned off on one of the other Greek soldiers. Such is the lot of women in war. In fact, one of the book's recurrent themes is how frequently men decide women's fates without them - Briseis's husband is chosen for her by Achilles without her even knowing. The title manifests itself a lot in the horrifically patriarchal world of Ancient Greece.

There's also nothing to spoil if you've read Madeline Miller's beautifully haunting rendition of this tale, The Song of Achilles, another 5-star read.

CHARACTERS

This is an interesting one. Briseis is, above all, a survivalist; while we see other Trojan women choose to commit suicide rather than suffer the Greek yoke, that's not for her. She'll live - but she won't revel in her mode of living as other women might. She spreads her legs because she has to, not because she's chosen it as her method of attaining power and security. Unsurprisingly, this is a deeply feminist book, reminding me often of The Handmaid's Tale. A huge variety of women and their responses to difficult circumstances are depicted, all with sympathy and without judgement, ranging from beautiful Helen to Uza the whore. Briseis is undoubtedly strong - but that strength lies in her ability to live on despite what she's seen done to her family, rather than physical feats.

And now, Achilles. Always the star, even in someone else's show. His portrayal here is far more complex and nuanced than in Miller, who perhaps shows him in too romantic a light. Here he's courteous and brutal, arrogant and insecure; the only constant, as always, is that Patroclus is part of his own soul. We are however left in doubt as to whether their relationship is ever truly a sexual one. There's no love lost between Achilles and Briseis, but over time a grudging respect does grow through their their shared love for Patroclus.

Patroclus sadly doesn't get too much of a look-in; while his dissatisfaction at being used as Achilles's messenger boy is hinted at, this is never explored. Perhaps rightly - after all, Briseis doesn't much care about understanding their relationship dynamics, and this is her story.

As ever, Agamemnon is a DICK.

WRITING

The story is told predominantly from Briseis's perspective, with a few third-person snippets from Achilles. Crucially, these snippets never come at moments one would think important to the story. For example, Patroclus and Achilles's dramatic deaths are glossed over; that's men's stuff, and the girls have no part in it. Instead we're treated to the world of concubines, slave-girls and washerwomen, the ones left behind in the camps when the men go off to fight.

The writing is a strange mixture of coarse and lyrical. Grief and loss are spoken about in a deeply eloquent way - but we also get incredibly detailed mentions of blood, urine, faeces, semen, sweat and vomit. And, of course, death. Barker's writing is so intense it's not too difficult to imagine the horrors of a millennia-ago war. In fact, the writing felt almost suffocatingly intimate.

While I can't see myself reading this book again, it's a must-read for anyone in search of more feminist literature.

Pat Barker is no stranger to writing about war themes (her Regeneration trilogy) . she also faces some stiff opposition in writing about Classical stories from a female perspective (Madeline Miller's Circe, Colm Toibin's House of Names)

Barker takes the story of Briseis, who is a young princess abducted by the Greeks and then sold to Achilles. The fate of the other women is graphically depicted. The women who were princesses etc are degraded and raped, but are not subjected to the level of violence and gang rape that the "ordinary" women experience. As the war drags on some of the "luckier" women end up ceaselessly weaving, acting as servants waiting on tables or working in the first aid tents. However most of the older women or those not considered "pretty" lead a life not that much better than animals. Briseis in the last pages ponders on their "legacy", and their silence (hence the title).

The author has an "earthiness" to her writing also in depicting the everyday lives of the soldiers.( I have heard modern- day soldiers singing some of the songs within the book.). The stark realities of what war can do the human body is not shied away from, with the descriptions of the "hospital" tents being graphic..

At first I kept comparing it to Miller's Song of Achilles. However as the book wore on it cast a spell on me, especially from the part in which Achilles falls out with Agamemnon over a point of principle leading to tragic consequences for all. I was most moved by the depictions of the grief of Priam for Hector and of Achilles for Patroclus. Achilles becomes increasingly intriguing as a character despite the female bias of the book.

Barker has important messages on what war does to people of all nations and particularly to the "silent girls" ,because centuries later women are often the victims with no voice in places of conflict. She implies that by telling this story their is some "legacy" for those who suffered.


I am no expert on the classical sources for this book but know that I became caught up in its inexorable progress to the fated tragic ending . However Barker leads us with a glimmer of hope for Briseis as she begins a new life.

A great re telling from Pat Barker about one woman’s story during the Trojan War. Briseis’ old life is destroyed when she is captured going from queen to slave. She becomes the possession of great warrior Achilles along with many other Trojan women. We follow her story as she navigates her new and dangerous life as a captive in the Greek camp. Imaginative and full of suspense, Barker writes skilfully - a tale worth telling.

"'Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying."

Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of the Iliad, the story of Achilles at the siege of Troy.

The epigraph to Barker's novel is what she has said in the inspiration for this book, a passage from Philip Roth's The Human Stain:

"‘You know how European literature begins?’ he’d ask, after having taken the roll at the first class meeting. ‘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 quarreled , Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.” 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.’"

That girl is Briseis whose voice is entirely absent from the Iliad. Barker's aim and achievement is to give her back her voice.

Briseis was the wife of King Mynes, ruler of the Trojan city of Lyrnessus. Even there, living in luxury, she notes that her husband is blind to the tensions between her, his mother and her slave girl lover:

"Mynes seemed entirely unaware of the tension, but then in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They’re the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don’t seem to see our battles – or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we’re not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?"

As the novel opens, when she was aged 19, the city was conquered by the Greek coalition, Mynes and all of the males were slaughtered (her father, three brothers and husband by Achilles) and the women shared among the conquerors. Briseis was given as a prize to Achilles for his bravery in the conflict.

Later in the siege of Troy, King Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces, was forced to return one of his prizes, the 15 year old Chryseis, to her father, a priest of Apollo, to appease the god and stop a plague that is decimating the camp. In turn he demanded that Achilles, who had led the demands for him to return Chryseis, hand over Briseis to him. Achilles does so but then withdraws himself and his troops from the conflict, tipping the balance of forces in the Trojans favour. Achilles is only persuaded to rejoin the battle when his best friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector while wearing Achilles own armour.

Barker retells this story but in Briseis' first person words:

"I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight."

I am writing this as someone whose own knowledge of The Iliad is fairly limited - Briseis is not a name I would have previously recognised. But that wasn't an issue reading the novel, it functions very well as a stand-alone self-contained text (with perhaps the occasional resort to Wikipedia for a who was that, or what happened next), and from others' reviews it seems to function equally well for those immersed in the original.

I also haven't read many of the obvious peers for comparison, notably Madeleine Miller's novels such as Curve, so my review is in absolute not relative terms.

Barker's telling isn't a modern rewrite but rather historical fiction. It sticks very closely to the original, only allowing herself leeway where there is more than one version (she has little time for the Achilles' heel story for example, she also has ).

And it isn't a feminist rewrite - and perhaps all the better for that. Her Briseis is a living breathing woman of her time, she knows the rules by which she is required to live, but that doesn't stop her having her own views.

The novel starts strikingly, immediately reminding us that history is written by the victors, here the Greeks not, as in Briseis case, the Trojans:

"Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up.

We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’."

The story takes us from the fall of Lyrnessus through to the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, but in Barker's retelling we get less of the glory and more of the human reality of blood and guts, less of the heroic Greek warriors and more of the stories of the Trojan women, bereaved and handed out as trophies to the very men who killed their own loved ones. After Briseis is first is forced to sleep with Achilles:

"I lay there, hating him, though of course he wasn’t doing anything he didn’t have a perfect right to do. If his prize of honour had been the armour of a great lord he wouldn’t have rested till he’d tried it out: lifted the shield, picked up the sword, assessed its length and weight, slashed it a few times through the air. That’s what he did to me. He tried me out."

As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says:

"'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.'"

Briseis key aim is to restore her status as a person, not a thing to be traded as a war trophy.

Contemplating the prospect of becoming Achilles wife, she enters in to a dialogue with the reader:

"'Would you really have married the man who’d killed your brothers?'

Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything , anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again.

'I just don’t know how you could do that.'

Well, no, of course you don’t. You’ve never been a slave."

As her relationship with King Priam temporarily reminds others of her status:

"Automedon blinked, forced, for a moment – and I honestly think it was for the first time – to see me as a human being, somebody who had a sister – and a sister, moreover, who was King Priam’s daughter- in-law.

As she contemplates trying to return with Priam to the doomed Troy:

"I saw my sister, my brother-in-law, the warmth and safety of their home – and above and beyond all that, the great prize of freedom. Me – myself again, a person with family, friends, a role in life. A woman, not a thing. Wasn’t that a prize worth risking everything for, however short a time I might have to enjoy it?"

One challenge the author faced is that there is a practical limit to how much of the story Briseis can have witnessed. While she succeeds in inserting her into several crucial moments, and at times has her relaying indirect reports of what happened elsewhere, for around a quarter of the novel Barker resorts to replacing Briseis' first person narration with a privileged third person narration from the perspective of the male characters, particularly Achilles (or Briseis later understanding of their perspective? the narrator's identity is a little unclear). I can understand why she has felt it necessary to do this, although it perhaps would have been a braver decision to have done without it, and allow some of the well-known drama between Achilles and Agamemnon simply not to be present on the page and merely seen by the impact on Briseis (and to the reader via their background knowledge of the story).

The third person sections also allow the novel to also present a (revisionist) character study of Achilles himself, one that present him as something of a Mummy's boy, still a child to his immortal mother the Nereid Thetis. Briseis first sees this, but without knowing what she sees, when she witnesses Achilles swimming (unusually for the time) and then seemingly speaking to the sea:

"He seemed to be arguing  with the sea, arguing or pleading  . . . The only word I thought I  understood was ‘Mummy’ and that made no sense at all. Mummy?   No, that couldn’t be right. But then he said it again: ‘Mummy, Mummy, ’like a small child crying to be picked up. It had to mean something else, but then ‘Mummy’is the same, or nearly the same, in so many different languages. Whatever it meant, I knew I shouldn’t be hearing it, but I didn’t dare move and so I crouched down and waited for it to stop."

Later a privileged third person section gives us Achilles perspective:

"He is, first and foremost, ‘the son of Peleus’– the name he’s known by throughout the army; his original, and always his most important, title. But that’s his public self. When he’s alone, and especially on those early-morning visits to the sea, he knows himself to be, inescapably, his mother’s son. She left when he was not quite seven, the age at which a boy leaves the women’s quarters and enters the world of men. Perhaps that’s why he never quite managed to make the transition, though it would astonish the men who’ve fought beside him to hear him say that. But of course he doesn’t say it. It’s a flaw, a weakness; he knows to keep it well hidden from the world. Only at night, drifting between sleep and waking, he finds himself back in the briny darkness of her womb, the long mistake of mortal life erased at last."

This theme - that each of the warriors who fought and died is ultimately a mother's son - is brought out powerfully when Briseis first gives us the long list of those slaughtered by Achilles in the assault on Troy and how he vanquished them, and then gives us their mother's memory of them, for example:

"And then –

Laogonus and Dardanus, brothers. They clung to the sides of their chariot, but Achilles hooked them out of it, as easily as picking out winkles with a pin. And then he killed them, quickly, efficiently, one with a spear thrust, the other with his sword.

And then –"

"But you see the problem, don’t you? How on earth can you feel any pity or concern confronted by this list of intolerably nameless names?

In later life, wherever I went, I always looked for the women of Troy who’d been scattered all over the Greek world. That skinny old woman with brown-spotted hands shuffling to answer her master’s door, can that really be Queen Hecuba, who, as a young and beautiful girl, newly married, had led the dancing in King Priam’s hall? Or that girl in the torn and shabby dress, hurrying to fetch water from the well, can that be one of Priam’s daughters?
...
I met a lot of the women, many of them common women whose names you won’t have heard.

And so I can tell you that the brothers Laogonus and Dardanus weren’t just brothers, they were twins. When they were little, Dardanus’speech was so bad his own mother couldn’t understand him. ‘What’s he saying?’she’d ask his brother. ‘He says he wants a slice of bread,’Laogonus would reply. ‘You’ve got to make him talk,’ the boys' grandmother said. ‘Make him ask for it himself.’ ‘But I was busy,’ the mother told me. ‘I’d have been stood there hours if I’d listened to her.’

And Briseis realises, defiantly, that by fathering children with their Trojan women, the Greeks have accidentally ensured the survival of their culture:

"We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams – and in their worst nightmares too."

One slightly odd note is sounded by the occasional imposition of slang speech patterns in dialogues, for example:

"‘Oooh, sorry I spoke.’"

"He made love – huh! – as if he hoped the next fuck would kill me."

"I’d survived. We-ell, in a manner of speaking I’d survived."

"‘Not like he does.’ Achilles looked up at Patroclus. ‘Oh, c’mon, when have you ever seen me drunk?’"

"‘He’s not human,’ Ajax blurted out. ‘Well of course he bloody isn’t,’ Agamemnon said. ‘His mother’s a fish.’"

If done consistently I would have less of an issue: we can't have the characters in an English language novel speaking vernacular ancient Greek, and standard British English is as good a representation as any. But the effect seems to have been rather randomly sprinkled in the text (and often in italics as if to draw attention).

But that minor issue aside, this is a strong retelling.

As the story concludes, Briseis realises that her attempt to tell her own story has to an extent failed. But Achilles is dead and her life is only just starting:

"Suppose, suppose just once, once, in all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy . . .? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times?

One thing I do know : they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp.

No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave.

Once, not so long ago, I tried to walk out of Achilles’ story – and failed. Now, my own story can begin."

Having come straight from reading The Beekeeper of Sinjar, a collection of harrowing first-hand accounts of women taken captive by Daesh, to The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker’s reimagining of the legendary Trojan War from a female perspective, it was disconcertingly effortless to step from 21st century Iraq to 13th century BCE Greece. So little, it seems, has altered in parts of the world during the intervening millennia.

Barker is a multi award-winning British novelist – most memorably carrying off the Booker prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, her final title in the remarkable Regeneration trilogy. She has been high on my list of favourite authors since her 1982 debut, Union Street, in which she told seven interwoven tales of working class women from the north of England whose lives had been circumscribed by deprivation and violence. Inevitably my expectations were high upon receiving a pre-publication copy of her first novel since the release of Noonday in 2015 (the final book in her most recent series). I’m relieved to report that I was far from disappointed.

Known for writing on themes of war, trauma, survival and recovery, it was perhaps unsurprising that Barker should choose to rewrite an ancient Greek epic (the Iliad, in this instance) from the point of view of the beautiful and clever Briseis of Lyrnessus, the mythical wife of Mynes, king of the Cilicians, who was captured during the siege of her homeland. Briseis’s father, mother and brothers were all slaughtered during the invasion, after which she was given to the great warrior Achilles as a prize for his prowess in battle, to be his sex slave.

Like Homer, Barker depicts Briseis as a valuable possession, but one who becomes a pawn in a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the brutal king of Mycenae, in the final year of the war. The latter angers Apollo by capturing Chryseis, the daughter of one of his priests. In revenge, the young god unleashes a plague on the Achaean Army, which can only be dispelled by returning the girl to her father. Agamemnon eventually agrees to do so, though with great reluctance, but immediately secures face-saving compensation by taking Briseis from Achilles, causing the conquering hero to withdraw from battle. She is eventually returned to him following the death of his closest friend Patroclus, when he returns to the battlefront and slays the Trojan hero Hector outside the gates of Troy – but by this time innumerable Greek lives have been lost.

The death of Achilles is not presented in the Iliad, but it is said that he was killed by Paris with an arrow to the heel, and his ashes buried in the same urn as Patroclus. Nothing is known of what happened to Briseis following his death, but it is likely she became the slave of another Greek warrior.

In Barker’s hands, the blue-eyed, golden-haired slave is a powerless but calmly unflinching observer of events: a voice for women silenced by history. She learns to adapt and survive but endures a great many humiliations from Achilles and other male characters who regard the female sex as mere chattels, useful only to satisfy their needs.

It is quite some time since I last found myself so utterly immersed in a historical novel. Pat Barker is unquestionably on form with this retelling of the most famous conflict in literature. She has produced a truly magnificent piece of writing.