The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

By the time I was eighteen I was the veteran of many long and bitter campaigns. 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?

In the Iliad, Briseis is a Trojan woman who is given as a slave to the conquering Greek hero Achilles when her town is sacked and destroyed. When Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces, takes her from Achilles--he had to give his own prize back, because she turned out to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo--Achilles is so insulted he refuses to fight. Without their best warrior, the Greeks begin to lose rapidly to the Trojans. Only when Agamemnon returns Briseis does Achilles consent to return to the battlefield, and brings the war nearly to a close by the killing of the Trojan warrior Hector.

Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls tells this story from Briseis' perspective: a once noble woman who has become the pawn of powerful men. Her relationship with Achilles is a tortured one--she is essentially a sex slave, after all--but compared to the brutal Agamemnon, he's a kind master, and it is Patroclus, Achilles' beloved friend and male lover, who really takes the time to show kindness to her. Yet the differences between the men seem almost immaterial, when Briseis has no choice between them. Achilles' indignation is not about his attachment to her, but rather about his pride; Agamemnon, too, has no use for her, he only wants to hurt Achilles. Briseis is made an object, a spoils, her life circumscribed by the petty squabbles of powerful men.

One thing I liked about The Silence of the Girls is how thoroughly it shows us that Briseis' story is a familiar narrative in The Iliad and Greek myth. In her way Briseis is another version of Helen, the contested possession of whom started the whole war in the first place. And like Helen, when things go badly, it is the woman who gets blamed: When they finally make up, Agamemnon and Achilles make a public declaration that they wish Briseis had never been born, because she committed the unforgivable mistake of coming between them. The Silence of the Girls is filled with women whose lives and deaths are at the mercy of men's pettiness: Cassandra, Chryseis, Polyxena, Ihpigenia, Tecmessa.

The challenge for The Silence of the Girls is that, to tell the full story of Achilles as it appears in The Iliad, it becomes necessary to move away from Briseis' point of view. As the story progresses, Barker begins to alternate Briseis' first person narrative with a third person narrative that follows Achilles himself: his grief over Patroclus' death, his tortured relationship with his sea-goddess mother, his dishonoring of Hector's body, his premonition of his own death in battle. But as the novel becomes more and more a simple novelization of The Iliad, the power and interest of its feminist viewpoint becomes diluted. It becomes harder, too, to overlook the essential clunkiness of the novel's style, which has the most legendary warrior in ancient Greek literature saying things like "So now, I just think: Fuck it."

I think the whole "redoing classic literature from a woman's perspective" thing has a high bar to clear these days. Blame Jean Rhys. When The Silence of the Girls works best, it presents something overlooked and essential about these stories, which are perhaps the most beloved and most well-known, historically speaking, of any on earth, which in turn reveals something about ourselves.