THE ILIAD

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS, BY PAT BARKER, IS AN ALTERNATIVE TAKE ON THE LITERARY CLASSIC,

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls an impressive feat of literary revisionism that reminds us that there are as many ways to tell a story as there are people involved. It’s The Iliad as seen through the eyes of 19-year-old Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus who’s taken as Achilles’ “bed-girl,” his “prize of honour” for mass slaughter.

Barker’s not the irst to turn to the classics for inspiration. It’s popular practice right now. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Michael Hughes’ Country, for example, transpose classical stories onto contemporary settings. While Barker’s project is reminiscent of Madeline Miller’s Circe, which retold The Odyssey from the witch’s point of view, not that of the warrior she waylays on his journey home. In giving female characters such as Circe and Briseis the voice they’ve traditionally been denied, readers glean a different version of events.

Barker’s subject has long been gender relations during conlict, along with the machinations of trauma and memory, so she’s in her element here. Her blooddrenched battle scenes are up there with the best of them, and she shows a keen understanding of the “never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge” fuelling the violence. Her focus, however, is that which takes place off the battleield, inlicted on the women in the “rape camps.”

Reduced to objects, they’re catalysts for conlict — Barker’s Helen inspires ribaldry not worship, “The eyes, the hair, the lips/

That launched a thousand battleships...” chant the soldiers — blamed for inciting hatred between men. Or they’re regarded as the victor’s spoils, claimed along with cattle and gold.

Briseis is both. Taken as a slave, Achilles and Agamemnon then feud over her.

The gods lit around in the wings, but fundamentally this is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men: “the brutal reality of conquest and slavery.” In seeing a legend differently, Barker also makes us rethink history.