Reviews with content warning for Slavery - The Silence of the Girls

This book is called "The Silence of the Girls" and supposedly offers "nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology... seen from Briseis's perspective". This is not the case in the slightest. After part 1, Briseis is relegated to what essentially boils down to a silent (haha, good one Pat Barker), flat, and apathetic side character in the "grand" story of Achilles, the siege of Troy, and the relationships with his fellow soldiers. This is not what I came for, and making Achilles the primary third person perspective for most of the book past part 1 is not what was originally promised.
The book does little to nothing to actually explore the life, emotions, tribulations, or brief moments of solace of these "Girls" so brazenly promoted in the book's title. If you want to read the Illiad, I'm sure there are many other retellings that do it more justice and with more depth, nuance, and complexity than this, which is a shame, as this perspective could have provided a captivating and thought-provoking angle if executed effectively.

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mushymargo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Loved seeing another POV of Achille’s story, about time. Felt real and raw and much closer to history then any other story of Troy. Loved the many mentions of other names from legends.

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incrediblemelk's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Barker had already written many books by the time she wrote this, and it feels deliberately written into the recent literary trend for ancient Greek mythological revisionism, which Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018) were writing into.

I haven't read The Song of Achilles but its treatment of the Achilles/Patroclus relationship would be an interesting point of comparison with The Silence of the Girls, which focuses much more on Briseis, the Trojan queen who becomes Achilles' fateful, fought-over war prize.

Here, Achilles and Patroclus are joked about as gay lovers among the other Greeks, but share a deeper and harder to explain love that stems from some childhood mutual recognition of trauma. Patroclus is basically the nicest of the men Briseis meets, and she comes to love him too (no, not in that way) to the point where their shared loss of Patroclus provokes a kind of rapprochement between Achilles and Briseis towards the end of the book.

In general this is quite a striking and grim picture of life for noncombatants in the Greek war village outside Troy, nine years into the Trojan War, who have been living there long enough to have small children by their captors. Barker vividly summons the misery of enslavement and the different ways in which different women respond to their change in social circumstances.

When we talk of war we imagine soldiers living alone and self-sufficiently in a homosocial environment, but this novel brings to life those whom historians patronisingly call "camp followers" and frame as parasitic opportunists. This novel is full of the textures of domestic life: cooking, cleaning, weaving cloth, tending to fires, serving meals, the problems of waste management and the pleasures of grinding herbs for medicine.

Knowing the mythology and the other literary depictions of these characters made the novel more rewarding – for instance, the way Barker treats the supernatural in both a skeptical and a quotidian way. Briseis doesn't believe that Achilles truly was invulnerable except for his heel – that's clearly propaganda to her – yet we see his nymph mum Thetis emerging from the mist-cloaked sea, and witness the way Hector's corpse miraculously becomes whole every time Achilles tries to desecrate it.

After Chryses, priest of Apollo, is rebuffed when he pleads with Agamemnon to return his daughter Chryseis, Briseis joins in the prayers to the "Lord of the silver arrows" and "Lord of mice", and plague strikes the camp and begins to spread from the sick rats, in what could be either a natural consequence of the filthy conditions, or the god's revenge.

The tragic irony, of course, is that Agamemnon is one of the most superstitious characters, and yet his petty mortal selfishness leads him to fatally offend the gods again and again. Of any of the Greeks, his actions are basically most directly responsible for the carnage of Troy and its long repercussions through Greek life, from the complete destruction of the House of Atreus to the Odyssey.

Briseis witnesses the final captivity of the Trojan royal women and observes that everyone is annoyed by Cassandra's raving prophecy that she and Agamemnon are heading off to their deaths. "Mate, I wouldn't want to have that in my bed," says one soldier – and it's the everyday blokeyness of these men, juxtaposed with the misery they inflict on women, that makes this a striking read.

It's less successful when it leaves Briseis's point of view and adopts that of Achilles himself. I found myself wishing Barker hadn't done this. It illuminates Achilles' character but it seems out of place in a book whose raison d'être seems to be restoring the voice of "silent" women.

BTW I really didn't like the title – it just reminded me of The Silence of the Lambs, but the novel doesn't borrow any of the themes of that story so why piggyback on it? It's based on an ancient ideology that linked women's virtue to their silence and invisibility. The whole Trojan conflict was caused by men but projected onto women, so it was interesting to give voice to Briseis.

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sarahsbooklife's review

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sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I like this story but I struggle to put my finger on what I did and didn't like about this book.
Maybe it was the characters or the writing or the story itself. But I struggled to regain interest in this book each time I stopped reading and put it down.
I think I liked this book because I like Greek myths and legends. It was quite interesting to read about a different side of the myth that goes into what it was like for the women that were taken as slaves by the Greeks.
It's an interesting take on a classic Greek tale.
But it's not the epic story that some people make it out to be. It felt a little lacklustre to be to be honest.

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