I spent quite a bit of time with ancient Greek mythology last year, specifically revolving around the Trojan War, starting with Madeline Miller’s luminous Circe and now (a.k.a. last fall) with Pat Barker’s haunting The Silence of the Girls. I’m excited to continue that trend this year by finally reading Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey. But first, let’s spend some time with the women who lived the war (mythologically speaking, perhaps).
The Silence of the Girls tells the story of Briseis and the women who were enslaved by the Greek army, living in their camp during the Trojan War. As the Greek army sacked Troy’s allies, women would be captured and doled out to Greek commanders and leaders as prizes. Briseis, perhaps one of the most famous of these women, was given to Achilles, and Agamemnon’s “stealing” of her after a dispuit resulted in Achilles boycotting the battle long enough to almost turn the tide in favor of the Trojans. She is often depicted as Achilles’ lover, and his sitting out of battle a sign of his love for her. In Barker’s telling, however, Briseis gets to tell her story in her own words rather than through the lens of the victors.
This book does not sugarcoat anything. Barker peals away all of the layers of distance and years and mythos from our traditional understandings of the Trojan War and reveals the horrifying reality of being a woman, specifically a prisoner of war, in a Greek army camp. The writing is gritty, realistic, dirty, unflinching, spare, visceral, and evocative. This is not the love story of Briseis and Achilles that we so often hear. This is Briseis’s tenuous existance in a place of supposed honor and enslavement. Barker focuses on the horrors of the lives these women led and the evolution of their feelings around their situations and the men who control things. She is particularly interested in Briseis’ evolving feelings about her relationships with both Achilles and Patroclus–both encompass distrust, discomfort, compassion, even real care in the case of Patroclus, but not forgiveness.
Structurally, the story is tight and the writing economical. The book comes in under 300 pages, but each page is packed with nuance and detail, creating detailed images in the reader’s mind. The narrative felt full, almost exhausted at the end. Barker writes no more and no less than she intends to and in doing so serves her characters’ stories specifically and precisely. Barker wants to emphasize how women were considered less than human in these army camps and yet how they fought to retain their humanity, and she forgrounds this theme through the alternating perspectives of her reader-proxy. The majority of the book is narrated by Briseis in first person, and we are meant to understand the plot through her. When she shifts to Achilles’ perspective, she writes in third person, keeping us at a remove from him and demoting the masculine perspective as the primary lens for understanding the Trojan War. The one thing that bothered me was that Barker, who is British, peppered in British colloquialisms throughout the dialoge–for example, “oy” and “mate”– but not consistently enough for it to feel authentic to the characters. Instead, it was often jarring and took me out of the time and place of the story.
When I was in high school, I performed in a production of Euripides’ Trojan Women. As part of our research, we were assigned a novel about Briseis’ experience during the war. It was fine, but ultimately it was a romance novel, looking at the story through rose-colored glasses. It furthered the narrative of Achilles and Briseis as lovers while de-emphasizing her status as an enslaved prisoner of war. Barker reverses that, giving Briseis agency and dignity in her own story. I wish The Silence of the Girls had been out then; it’s the book we should have read instead. And on the whole, it’s pretty sublime.