A review by melcanread
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Briseis' life is turned upside down when her city falls to the Greeks, and she is chosen by Achilles as his prize of honour. What follows is a retelling of the events of the Trojan war told from a woman's perspective. 

There were quite a few parts of this book that made me angry, but I attest that to the brilliance of Pat Barker's writing. I closed the book feeling absolutely livid, knowing that while the places may or may not have been fictional, this is exactly what happened during war - and still happens to this day. 

I was furious at Achilles for all of his actions, Odysseus too. The way these women were bartered for and traded as though they were property, because in the eyes of the Greeks, they were. How this was the story of all the women who became spoils of war, and yet Achilles' personal story was intertwined and at some times, overpowering, drowning out Briseis story and her voice. 

Looking back, it seemed to me. I'd been trying to escape not just from camp, but from Achilles' story; and I'd failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story - his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn't matter. Here I was, again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story and yet with no real part to play in it.

Every single man, even the "kind" ones, were varying degrees of bad. The way Patroclus loved Achilles, and was grateful for the gift Achilles bestowed on him, he would only rape Iphis gently. How the only reason Chryseis was returned to her family was because Agamemnon and Achilles' men were cursed with the plague. There was no humanity in any of these men, despite Pat Barker giving us reasons for Achilles' brutality in an attempt to make him seem not as cruel. 

The quotes you could lift from this book, too, were impeccable.

We're going to survive - our songs, our stories. They'll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We'll be in their dreams - and in their worst nightmares too.

I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.

I thought: 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.

What do they see? A tall man standing on a parapet with the golden light of early evening catching his hair? No of course they don't. They see the goddess Athena wrap her glittering aegis round his shoulders; they see flames thirty feet high spring from the top of his head. 

All in all, I hated every second of this book, because women, even in modern times, can never catch a break. 5 stars. It was exceptional.