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A review by telthor
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
3.0
Look, I really truly think it's a two star read. It's muddled and draggy and I really, really, reALLY hate the anachronistic British slang that permeates the text. Makes it sound like it's taking place last week. Which, I dunno, might be the point since this sort of thing could possibly be going on. War being war being disgusting and not at all shy about depicting humans as the lowest of the low.
You cheer the Rat Plague for killing rapists. It's the lowest of the low for us as a species.
But the audiobook is SO well done, with two amazing readers, I have to give it an extra star. Aaargh, they did such a magnificent job that it was hard to stop listening.
It opens with such strength. It's chilling, sharp, and tightly plotted, for the first couple chapters. But somehow it starts to drag on and on. At about the halfway marker, once we start getting Achilles's voice to counter Briseis's voice, it starts feeling more muddled and a little directionless to my mind. We start fighting over whose story it is. In the end, Briseis bows out and tells the reader flatly, "It's not my story," which, okay, that's fine and fair. But by doing that her sections feel pointless and repetitive. I found myself looking forward much more eagerly for Achilles's chapters. Again, maybe it's the point and the book is being too clever for me, by silencing its main character to the point where she may as well not even be in the book? There's a deeper meaning?
But considering I didn't actually enjoy any of it despite it being all clever and book-clubby-discussion-instigating, I refuse to give it another star. It's already wheedled out an extra for the voice acting. I'm not going to give in just because it thought it was being clever when in reality it just felt confused and muddled and mixed.
So, to briefly sum up: laggy, confusing, and anachronistic; but super well read, with a really powerful opening and a pretty cool last third (even if it was just The Iliad, so all the really cool plot-based bits were written by someone else, technically).
You cheer the Rat Plague for killing rapists. It's the lowest of the low for us as a species.
But the audiobook is SO well done, with two amazing readers, I have to give it an extra star. Aaargh, they did such a magnificent job that it was hard to stop listening.
It opens with such strength. It's chilling, sharp, and tightly plotted, for the first couple chapters. But somehow it starts to drag on and on. At about the halfway marker, once we start getting Achilles's voice to counter Briseis's voice, it starts feeling more muddled and a little directionless to my mind. We start fighting over whose story it is. In the end, Briseis bows out and tells the reader flatly, "It's not my story," which, okay, that's fine and fair. But by doing that her sections feel pointless and repetitive. I found myself looking forward much more eagerly for Achilles's chapters. Again, maybe it's the point and the book is being too clever for me, by silencing its main character to the point where she may as well not even be in the book? There's a deeper meaning?
But considering I didn't actually enjoy any of it despite it being all clever and book-clubby-discussion-instigating, I refuse to give it another star. It's already wheedled out an extra for the voice acting. I'm not going to give in just because it thought it was being clever when in reality it just felt confused and muddled and mixed.
So, to briefly sum up: laggy, confusing, and anachronistic; but super well read, with a really powerful opening and a pretty cool last third (even if it was just The Iliad, so all the really cool plot-based bits were written by someone else, technically).