The Silence of the Girls: A Novel

"This is a retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, the slave girl who is captured by the Greeks. It’s a very intense read, probably one we would recommend for the more senior students at school, because there are quite savage depictions of rape and the reality of what it was like for women to be in the Greek camp. It doesn’t spare any of the detail. As a teacher, you can have read the Iliad countless times, but it’s one of those things where suddenly you realise that you haven’t really thought about what it was like for women in the camp. This book allows you to realise that one of the key issues with the classics—one of the things that we’re always fighting against—is the lack of information we have about women. Particularly when you’re teaching at an all-girls school, it’s something you come back to again and again: what was it like for women? We can just about work out what it was like for aristocratic women, but what it was like for poorer women, women of lower social status and prostitutes? This book is an uncomfortable read but a very worthy one. The book is based on the Iliad , which is already mythical, legendary—whatever you want to call it—but it being a work of fiction does allow for certain creative liberties. It means Pat Barker can not only bring in ideas of what women’s lives were like in 4th and 5th century Athens, but also transplant it into this accessible sphere. So perhaps historical fiction does allow for more scope in that area. So Chryseis is owned by Agamemnon, and Briseis by Achilles. Chryseis’s dad is a priest of Apollo and he brings down a plague on the Greeks. So, Agamemnon has to hand back Chryseis and he doesn’t want to. In the midst of all this, Achilles says, ‘Well, you need to do what you’re told’ and Agamemnon replies, ‘If I’m going to do that, I’m going to take Briseis off you.’ Briseis is taken away from him and so Achilles refuses to fight. Because he’s the best fighter of all the Greeks, it leads to devastation for them throughout the Iliad. Eventually, he brings himself back into the fighting because Patroclus, his best friend, is killed in an attack on Troy. The first line of the Iliad is “Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles” and it’s basically about Achilles’s anger cycle. He gets angry; he stays angry; he becomes less angry—though he’s still pretty angry all the way through. Briseis is important because (and again, it’s an unsettling truth about the Iliad ) she is property, passed from person to person. What The Silence of the Girls does is say, ‘Let’s look past what Homer gives us, and look at what it would have been like for her.’ Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. There’s a line in the Iliad where Priam kisses Achilles’s hands. Achilles has just murdered his son, Hector, and Priam says, ‘I do what no man before me has ever done; I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.’ In the book, Briseis says, ‘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.’ So it’s an interesting change around of the pattern. It works really well. Yes, Helen is this mystical figure: you’re never quite sure what’s going on with her. And that’s a very faithful retelling of what she’s like in the Iliad , because you’re never quite sure. She’s this woman in her own sphere, she’s a demigod and sits in that nonpareil world between the Gods and men."

"Yes, it’s from the perspective of Briseis, the one-time queen of Troy and now the war bride of Achilles. What Pat Barker does so extraordinarily is she turns The Iliad inside out, telling it from a female perspective. I think the title speaks to the fact that the book is so much about the interior life of Briseis. She very rarely speaks aloud, I realised. I’d read Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ trilogy prior to reading this, and she has always written so, so powerfully about war and its aftermath, its impact on the vulnerable in society. Various scenes have stayed with me—particularly one scene towards the end of The Silence of the Girls , where Priam’s daughter Polyxena is sacrificed on Achille’s burial mound. It’s so blistering, the way Barker describes the butchering of the girl. It’s a brilliant book. I think when we are talking about feminist historical fiction, it is usually about a strong female figure within a specific historical context, and the ways in which gender impacts that character’s life. So, for example, with The Silence of the Girls , Barker flips on its head this very famous scene from the Iliad where Priam goes to Achilles and begs for his son’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.” And in that scene, Briseis silently thinks “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.” So it’s about re-examining things from the perspective of women and the things we take for granted. Absolutely."