Read Maybe
Length 304
Quick Review Pat Barker retells the Iliad in The Silence of the Girls from a new and forgotten point of view: the women. Briseis was queen of a city before it fell making her a slave to Achilles.
We know the story of Helen of Troy. We know of Helen through the stories of men. What about women? Where were they? What is their story? They were lost to history, so Pat Barker gives them a voice in The Silence of the Girls through Briseis, a queen who fell with her city.
Briseis was still a teenager and a queen of a neighboring Trojan city when the Greeks attacked her city. As a little girl, she lived in Troy spending time with Helen. She was a proud Trojan woman. She watched everything and everyone she cared for destroyed by the Greeks led by Achilles. She became a slave to Achilles in the Greek camp outside of Troy. Briseis is used as a pawn and as a woman, but she listens and watches. The Silence of the Girls is Barker’s take on what the women, who were barely old enough to be called women, went through as victims of war. Pawns of men.
The women in the camp have one role: serve the men. They do it in a variety of ways: being “bed-girls,” working in the medical tent, weaving, and serving. They go where they are told, when they are told, and they do it silently. They are no longer women; they are objects with a purpose. They were a fundamental reason the Greeks won the war.
The Silence of the Girls is told mostly from Briseis’ perspective. There are minor chapters told from Achilles’ perspective. Briseis is strong and broken and full of disgust for her owners and situation because who wouldn’t be. BIG BUT. Briseis is the flattest character in the novel. The side characters were far more interesting. Briseis showed almost nothing but disgust the women who were fond of their captors. Achilles was the enemy, but he was complicated as all humans are. As a woman with a past of abuse, it’s far more complicated than the simplicity of emotion that Barker illustrates in Briseis. Stockholm syndrome is real and complicated. In a world where there is very little kindness, Briseis was on the receiving end of a lot of kindness, which would affect how she felt about her captors, but it just doesn’t in the novel. Barker really needed to dive into the psyche of an abused woman, and she didn’t.
I’ve seen The Silence of the Girls referred to as a masterpiece. It’s good, but it’s not that good. The emotions fall flat for the situation. The Washington Post’s review said the only remnant of Briseis’ past as a queen is a tunic of her father’s and that Pat Barker upends the storytelling of famous women, who have the most privilege. Except this isn’t true at all. Barker is telling the story of a privileged woman. Briseis was a queen and a young, beautiful one at that. She was Achilles’ concubine because she was a queen. A “prize.” Had she been a woman of lesser or no status, she would have been one of the women scavenging under tents and dying with the rats. Briseis complained of her life as a slave, but even her atrocious status as a “bed-girl” was much better than women of lesser status. She was not beaten. She was not passed around. She was not starved. She was not on the receiving end of so many possible horrors. There is no gratitude for that, and victims of abuse always, always, always see how it could be worse. Briseis doesn’t.
I truly did enjoy reading The Silence of the Girls. It was a really entertaining book to read with the right amount of mysticism and historicity. It could have been more, though. It could have been a triumph for abused women. Instead it fell flat.
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Memorable Quotes
“Oh, I watched him all right, I watched him like a mouse.”
“Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”
“How on earth can you feel any pity or concern confronted by this list of intolerably nameless names.”
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Title: The Silence of Girls
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Doubleday
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780385544214