A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Economist, Financial Times Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Finalist for the Women’s Prize for FictionHere 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 … 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.
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The Silence of the Girls is brilliant—fascinating, riveting and blood chilling in its matter-of-fact attitude toward war and those who are its spoils. I loved the book for its craftsmanship, as well is its wonderful evocation of the ancient world and the not-so-ancient minds of the people inhabiting it.
A shattering account of the siege of Troy by Briseis, noblewoman captured and given to Achilles as a trophy. I have always loved Pat Barker’s novels, but I was unsure about how she would handle ancient history. She does not falter. I couldn’t put it down.
I read this following both Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey and Madeleine Miller’s Circe so I’m in ancient Greek heaven. This is a small slice of the Odyssey story about Briseis, a queen that was a prize of war awarded to the great Achilles. It’s a fascinating take on the tale, one that is as gritty as it is beautiful, a book that lacks any sugar-coating and is full of difficult relationships that seem true to the human spirit, both the good and bad. In that, Barker is a true master, really bringing home the emotions of being in the midst of a terrible and bloody war and how that takes its toll on everyone within its circle.
My lack of five stars (why can’t we give 4.5 stars?!) is more about the jarring shift of POV from Briseis to Achilles, which doesn’t occur until halfway through the book and it comes without warning. There is also a 1st to 3rd person switch which normally I wouldn’t object to, but Barker is so adept at making us feel close to Briseis that when we shift to Achilles’ POV and don’t have the same depth of understanding of who he is, it feels like a bit of a letdown.
That said, I ripped through this book in two nights–I just couldn’t put it down.
For an alternate take on the same story, also check out Emily Hauser’s For The Most Beautiful.
Thanks NetGalley, for the chance to check out an early copy of this novel
An account of the last days of the Trojan war, as told from the point of view (primarily) of Briseis, the queen of a nearby kingdom, who is captured and enslaved by Achilles. A re-telling is always a re-visioning, a look at an old story through a new lens. In this novel, Pat Barker updates one of our oldest stories with a perspective that history didn’t bother to record, and the result is powerful indeed. I devoured this in two delicious days. I loved the sensory detail, which was so immediate, so rich – we feel the salt of the sea on Briseis’ skin and in her hair, smell the pungency of herbs and the putrefaction of plague, experience the deep chill of an ocean fog and the stifling, breathless heat of an enclosed shack. As I often do, I read other reviews before I composed my own – I like to see how my opinion aligns and/or differs – and ironically, the two elements that were most often criticized were, to me, some of the strongest elements of the novel. I enjoyed the modern, colloquial language – we can’t begin to know what the slang of the time actually sounded like, but we can be sure that soldiers, slaves and common men and women used it. The casual language breathed real life into characters whose names are so well known, they’ve been flattened out over thousands of years and uncountable repetitions of their stories. I also enjoyed the shifts in point of view between Briseis’ first person, and Achilles’ third person, as well as the instances where Briseis addresses the reader. The latter, especially, I found compelling – as if Briseis were speaking directly to me across the ages separating us. Finally, Pat Barker sketched out so many scenes that pulled me into intimate, human connection with her characters – Achilles and Briseis sharing the practicalities, indignities and complicated honor of washing Hector’s body; the early-morning hush and tenderness when Briseis brings King Priam warm water and a cloth to wash with; and Tecmessa, Ajax’s woman, walking and singing their son to sleep surrounded by Greek soldiers: “There they were: battle-hardened fighters every one, listening to a slave sing a Trojan lullaby to her Greek baby.” Gorgeous.
If “Silence becomes a woman,” I’m glad Pat Barker decided to speak!
Queen of Lyrnessus, Briseis is the spoil of a war neither she not her kin wanted or encouraged. Instead, she is caught in the most epic of battles, the one waged against Troy by angry Greeks enraged by the kidnapping of the beautiful Helen, wife of Menelaus. Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother, is commander in chief of the Greek army, but Achilles is the real leader, the unbeatable warrior who inspires soldiers from both sides, Greeks and Trojans alike. And Briseis is simply another prize awarded to him after he has slain sixty men to conquer her city, including her father and four brother’s.
Stripped of her rank, Briseis becomes Achilles’s slave and joins the other captive women inside the Greek compound, serving and obeying her master in and out of bed. It is a life of routine, rape, pain, frustration and bitterness that she mutely shares with every other broken woman in the camp, while observing the men surrounding her. One stands out among the rest, Patroclus, and not because of his special relationship with Achilles. He alone shows an interest for her as a person, so the story becomes one of men, too, of their fighting, their bravery and their deaths. Unaware that destiny has reserved her a very special place, she follows the unfolding of the battle and of the carnage until the fatal break between Achilles and Agamemnon will change the course of history forever.
I have known and loved the story of the fall of Troy since I was a toddler, but after reading The Silence Of The Girls by Pat Barker, I realize I only knew one side of it, the men’s side. Now finally, we can all hear the women’s voices telling of the horror and brutality they’re forced to endure. Using the first person point of view and a compelling, detached yet intimately personal narration, the author gives passion and power to those women whom history has done its best to forget. I’m just grateful to Mrs. Barker for having resurrected them from their unjust oblivion in order to bear witness to man’s inhumanity to man.
But this book isn’t only about women.
Mrs. Barker’s impressive achievement in my opinion is her convincing and original depiction of those men everyone knows in one way or another. In stark vividness, they come alive like never before, Agamemnon as a lazy brute, Achilles as a spoiled child and Patroclus, Achilles’s soul-mate and confidant, as a peacemaker. So they aren’t heroes, rather frail human beings trying to cope with a bad situation that threatens to become worst at a moment’s notice.
Truly moving and poignant, it deserves all the 5 out of 5 stars that I’ve rated it, if not more, and though I’m delighted to have read this book, I’m real sorry it has ended!
I’m not sure how to review this novel. There were many things I liked, many I didn’t like at all. It was beautiful and bleak and gruesome and poignant. Breisis was the main narrator, and yet this wasn’t so much her story as it was Achilles’s story, and really, Achilles was not a likable character in the least. I suppose, as a slave, Breisis’s character rang true, though it was hard to see her passed around as an object. I would say this is a difficult novel to stomach because of the gruesome war & death elements, but it was a fast moving read as well–I really looked forward to reading more of it each evening. I wanted to love it, but how can you love a story of slavery and war and injustice? And was that the point? In the end, I might not have loved it, but I respected it. There is a thread of hope near the end, and I was happy for that. If you like Trojan & Greek history and stories of Achilles, I’d recommend it highly.
After reading The Song of Achilles, this book went on my reading list. I waited a while to get it from my local library. It moves well in the beginning, but gets bogged down and awkward by the shift from 1st person to 3rd person in the book. Also, the dialog and some phrases seemed completely out of place using words such as “bloody” and others that seemed too modern for the time period in which it takes place.
This is an important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies. ‘The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.’ Barker’s novel is an invitation to tell those forgotten stories, and to listen for voices silenced by history and power.
Given the title, synopsis, and back cover endorsements, I went into this story assuming it would be a strong feminist retelling of The Iliad; giving voice to the silenced women of the Trojan War. Though it certainly brings Briseis to life, her voice is diminished by the incorporation of Achilles’s POV in several sections of the novel. Still yet, I enjoyed this well-crafted depiction of Greek camp life for the female prisoners of war and how they coped with their burdens. At the end of the novel, Barker alludes to the possibility of telling more of Briseis’s story (beyond that of Achilles) in book two of The Women of Troy series. Might pick it up.
• Set during the Trojan War
• Shows the physical & emotional toll of war on women
• Achilles, Patroclus, & Agamemnon from Briseis’s POV
• CW: graphic scenes of war/rape/murder
“There they were: battle-hardened fighters every one, listening to a slave sing a Trojan lullaby to her Greek baby. I thought: We’re going to survive — our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us…their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them.“ – Briseis
“What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginable distant times? One thing I do know: 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.” – Briseis
Pat Barker writes with such empathy. Imagine you are a high-born girl, married at 15 to some man of your father’s choosing. You become Queen of your husband’s dominion. Then the fortunes of war turn against your husband, and you find yourself under siege, huddled with other women and children, listening to the sounds of your city falling. Then the foreign men barge in and you brace yourself for the worst.
This is how Pat Barker’s THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS begins. We witness the powerlessness of women against male aggression, very timely in the age of “Me too” and the unsavory revelations connected to Brett Kavanaugh, Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and others. We like to think we have made progress. In many ways we have. But all too often, young women find themselves prey to greedy men.
Five stars. #patbarker #thesilenceofthegirls
As I close the book for a final time, relief. If I were not reading it to fulfill a category for my library’s summer reading challenge, with not enough time to find and read something else, I would have abandoned this one long ago. A shame really, because I had expected it to be better.
What I liked about “The Silence of the Girls”:
I don’t know how to answer this. Patroclus was the sole piece of the story for which I felt something positive.
What I didn’t care for:
The voice – I have read much historical fiction, even when it is more fantasy than reality, though I will admit this is the first mythology I’ve tackled. However, the best historical fiction novels, whatever sub-genres they might also include, use language in a more accurate way. Here, the words felt too modern, the terminology too British. I wasn’t immersed in a “long long time ago.” The language made me feel like…you know when they dub another language over a movie and the movement of the mouths doesn’t match the sound? Like that.
A horrible lack of punctuation – Punctuation exists for a reason. When it isn’t used properly, we struggle to know where to pause in a sentence so that its content makes sense. Sentences were awkward where they lacked commas, forcing me to stop and reread it a second or even third time.
No sense of redemption or purpose – It wasn’t the type of story where one expects a happily ever after. I would have liked there to be something less bleak though. Something less bitter. Maybe I am asking too much of Briseis, given her circumstances, but the whole book showed no growth of character and so it felt like it just plodded off into depressing eternity.
Monotony – There is really only so much I can take of the same cycle of depressing events. I get it: the days were miserable for these captive women. They ground through it, every day the same grueling agony as the day before. But what’s the purpose of having to read it page after page after page? Surely, there were other emotions, even ugly ones: anger, frustration, resentment, bitterness, determination, pride, longing. Or maybe this story would have been better narrated by someone other than Briseis.
Awkward storytelling – The format in which the story was told, with Briseis apparently recollecting to herself (except for the parts when we’re in Achilles’ mind, which felt out of place in the middle of Briseis’ thoughts), left too many holes. At times, it felt like she was telling the events as an old woman far in the future from the bulk of the story. Other times, it was as if she was telling from the ships departing the ruins of Troy. I did not enjoy the lack of clarity.
Perhaps if I had much recollection of reading The Iliad, it might have felt like fleshing out a story with which I was already familiar. To be frank, I was assigned to read it my freshman year of high school, approximately three decades ago. I am sure I practiced some hybrid combination of skimming and reading, as I was prone to do when reading under duress (I loathe assigned reading and it is the surest way for me lose all interest in the matter), and so I have retained only the very slimmest of basics. Whether or not I might have gotten more out of “The Silence of the Girls” with a more firm foundation is a moot point, though, when the structure of this book would have remained the same: awkward, aimless, and unpleasant.
Too much of the male perspective, which I didn’t feel appropriate for this book. Overall, a good read and unique book.
This retelling of The Iliad is from the women’s point of view—or, really, the girls, young women enslaved and raped and killed. I have too recently read (listened to) Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, another retelling but from the male point of view (the historically main point of view), and so the turns of plot were a bit too well-known. But I appreciated the blunt brutality and lack of sentiment. We started being more brutal and honest with war in the twentieth century and can now look back at all those previous wars, too. Our heroes will never be the same. In this account, for example, Odysseus is recognizable as clever, reasonable, and pining for Penelope. He also matter-of-factly picks up a toddler and dashes out his brains because this is what you do to the boys and pregnant women who might be carrying boys of a city you have just conquered.
I read this book in June, and it made an impression. It’s well written, and I love the idea of seeing the war from a womans view. Briseis is an interesting character and the book pulls you in to her story from the beginning. The story of Troy and Greece is always narrated from the soldiers point of view, and women are either taken as slaves or killed. To see it through Briseis eyes, to see Achilles through her eyes, is far more interesting. I gave away my copy, but I’ve already ordered a second one.
This is a biting retelling of The Iliad from the point of view of the slave girl Briseis. It felt angry and raw and terrifyingly accurate. It’s not that the original tells her story poorly but that, as a woman and a slave, her story wasn’t considered worth the telling. Pat Barker brings Briseis centre stage in the most stunning way.
One of my top ten reads in the first half of 2019 (by writers I don’t know well enough to invite to dinner). By one of our more formidable and unblinking of novelists, this is a smart and eye-opening historical novel from an unusual point of view, that of a female slave used and abused by powerful men. You have never seen the Trojan War or the figure of Achilles in quite this way before. Writers: a great book to study for 1st person pov, how to handle a protagonist who is essentially powerless and forced into passivity, gender and feminist issues, and replaying history and our ancient stories in a new light.
I could hardly put it down. The characters drew you into to the story of the Trojan War as told by captured Trojan women and Achilles. Well written.
Whew, a tough book to read but engrossing, fascinating, and hard to put down. Told from a female slaves point of view during the Trojan War, the novel exposes the reality of being a sex slave (if you were an enemy male, you were slaughtered; an enemy female, you became a sex slave) in the Greek camp, specifically of the various Greek kings.
The book shows how devastating women’s lives were during that timeframe and how little control they had over their lives and futures. It shows how strong they were and how much they were able to endure. It makes you happy that we have so much today and can pass this on to our daughters and grands.
In The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker gives a voice to many of the female characters of The Iliad. Recognising that war is not simply about men fighting each other, but about its repercussions across the whole society, this book has a timeless message. In addition, Barker is a consummate story-teller. You might think that retelling an old story might be boring – it is not! It’s absolutely rivetring in the hands (the words) of Pat Barker. Long may she continue writing.