The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

Here is the story of the Iliad as we’ve never heard it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp—concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead—as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion. Brilliantly written, filled with moments of terror and beauty, The Silence of the Girls gives voice to an extraordinary woman—and makes an ancient story new again.

One sentence synopsis... Barker's retelling of the Iliad imagines how the war would be remembered today if women's stories weren't marginalized, denied credibility, or wholly dismissed. .

Read it if you liked... historical reimaginings like Madeline Miller's ‘Circe' or ‘Song of Achilles'.

Dream casting... Rose Byrne played the role of Briseis (this novel's protagonist) in the 2004 ‘Troy' but for this story's version of her I'd pick someone younger like Eliza Scanlen.

I really enjoyed listening to this on audiobook. I had been putting off reading this for a while, not really sure why, but glad I finally picked it up. I enjoyed the narration, I enjoyed the story, and I always enjoy retellings of classics, add in the unique perspective of being told mostly by Achilles prize slave, made this book a win for me.

It's hard to think of a more tired, stale, boring, clapped-out premise than “famous historical tale told from the perspective of the women involved”, which has been done to death and far past it in the last 20 years, mostly by authors who unfortunately think that the premise is somehow so inherently interesting that they don't have to do any more work.

So the only reason I read this book is it's by Pat Barker, who is a genius, and my god she did not disappoint.

This is better than Homer. Really. The story lives and breathes with a visceral reality and enormous compassion, both completely typical of Barker's work, who I swear understands men at war better than any living writer.

This is the story of the Illiad as told in the voice of the female captive whose seizure by Agamemnon is the source of the “rage of Achilles” in the first place. Briseis was born a princess whose city fell the marauding Achaeans as they set siege to Troy. Chosen by Achilles as a prize, taken from him by a churlish commander, she sees the relations of power and love and lust and pride and honour that drive these men to the pursuit of glory, and their doom.

The brilliance of Barker's work is we both feel for Briseis's plight while somehow also finding sympathy for her captors, who are no less trapped in the same system of power and violence.

One really notable feature of her telling is the linear modernity of the narrative structure: Homer frequently introduces characters and only much later tells us important information about them–I swear he was making it up as he went along–which can make the Illiad challenging for modern audiences who don't already know who everyone is. Barker isn't having any of that, and uses all the lessons we have learned in the past two thousand years to tell the story more fluently and effectively than Homer did.