The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

The trend for the retelling of the Greek legends from the female perspective is sustained in this engrossing novel from the masterful pen of Pat Barker. 

‘There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan war whose voice has been silent - till now. Discover the greatest Greek myth of all - retold by the witness that history forgot . . .

Briseis was a queen until her city was destroyed. Now she is slave to Achilles, the man who butchered her husband and brothers. Trapped in a world defined by men, can she survive to become the author of her own story?’

Like Circe, the novel concentrates on one woman’s story, Briseis. That is not to say that we are not privy to the fates, the feelings of the other women but the main thrust of the story is the Achilles/Briseis one. Much of the narrative is given to Achilles and the Achilles/Patroclus dynamic but I feel it is to offer us the opportunity to understand Briseis better and get some kind of angle on the situation as a whole. The Iliad is an ancient work and to read it today it has to be placed in context. That is never easy when you’re bringing contemporary thinking with you. That’s why stories such as these are so fascinating. We can question why these woman seemed to be so accepting of their fate but they were behaving within the social framework of the time.  What modern fiction is doing is offering the women a voice from a more contemporary frame of reference. It makes for some compelling stories.

But I think you have to add to that mix the fact that, as an author, Pat Barker is continuing to write about war albeit a very different one from those of the Regeneration trilogy and the Life Class trilogy. But again it’s young people living in a war situation. The brutality and its after effects resurfaces in all the books whether graphic or oblique. So it becomes interesting to compare war though the centuries. As Kim Sherwood observed in Testament, ‘‘We are here because history doesn’t happen in the past tense.’ History is now and that's how we make sense of it. It was the same for the women living through the Trojan war. Their pasts and their futures were inconsequential compared to their present and ultimately their survival.

But it's one thing to have a ready-made story plotted for you. It's how you deal with it, how you take that story and create a narrative that gives it an alternate substance and a texture that will determine whether your readers want to go with it. After all anyone can  pick up a copy of the Iliad. So why would you want to read The Silence of the Girls? Because it's beautifully written. Brutal in its descriptions. Expansive in its emotion. Eloquent in its exposition. And haunting in its after effects.