The Silence of the Girls

It's hard to think of a more tired, stale, boring, clapped-out premise than “famous historical tale told from the perspective of the women involved”, which has been done to death and far past it in the last 20 years, mostly by authors who unfortunately think that the premise is somehow so inherently interesting that they don't have to do any more work.

So the only reason I read this book is it's by Pat Barker, who is a genius, and my god she did not disappoint.

This is better than Homer. Really. The story lives and breathes with a visceral reality and enormous compassion, both completely typical of Barker's work, who I swear understands men at war better than any living writer.

This is the story of the Illiad as told in the voice of the female captive whose seizure by Agamemnon is the source of the “rage of Achilles” in the first place. Briseis was born a princess whose city fell the marauding Achaeans as they set siege to Troy. Chosen by Achilles as a prize, taken from him by a churlish commander, she sees the relations of power and love and lust and pride and honour that drive these men to the pursuit of glory, and their doom.

The brilliance of Barker's work is we both feel for Briseis's plight while somehow also finding sympathy for her captors, who are no less trapped in the same system of power and violence.

One really notable feature of her telling is the linear modernity of the narrative structure: Homer frequently introduces characters and only much later tells us important information about them–I swear he was making it up as he went along–which can make the Illiad challenging for modern audiences who don't already know who everyone is. Barker isn't having any of that, and uses all the lessons we have learned in the past two thousand years to tell the story more fluently and effectively than Homer did.