The classics are experiencing a feminist revolution. Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey—the first to be written by a woman—was published to great acclaim at the end of 2016. Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a contemporary reworking of Antigone, won the 2017 Women's Prize. And American author Madeline Miller has just published Circe, her second novel based on classical characters. Joining this group is the award-winning British novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, Toby's Room), whose 14th novel, The Silence of the Girls, is a reimagining of one of the key episodes in the Iliad, told from the perspective of a captured queen living in the Greek army camp during the final weeks of the Trojan War.

Briseis was the queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms when her city was sacked and her husband and brothers were killed. A prize of battle, she becomes the property of Achilles, and she lives in the women's quarters but is available to him as his concubine and slave. When King Agamemnon demands Briseis for his own, Achilles relinquishes her but, as a show of resistance, refuses to fight the Trojans any longer. In Barker's retelling, Briseis finds herself torn between the two men, helpless but also uniquely positioned to observe the power struggle whose outcome will decide the fate of the ancient world.

The Iliad concerns a war fought over a woman, and women play a major role in the epic poem as nurses, wives and, of course, unwilling sex slaves. Yet the lack of women's voices in the original text is deafening. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis is the master of the narrative, telling her story in counterpoint to Achilles, becoming her own subject rather than his object. Her voice is wryly observant and wholly cognizant of the cost that she and other women have paid for the violence and abuses of war perpetrated by men. Barker's retelling of some of the most famous events of the Iliad feels strangely relevant to today—displaced peoples, war refugees, abandoned women and children, sexual violence—and assures us that women's voices will be silent no longer.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Following the fall of her city to the Greek army, Briseis, former queen of Lyrnessus, sister city of Troy, is awarded to Achilles as his captive and concubine. She tells her story of slavery, rape, and survival as an insider witnessing the strategies of Achilles and his closest companion Petroclus. Achilles comes to value Briseis to the point of refusing to go to battle when Agamemnon demands her services. The Greek army, demoralized by the loss of their greatest warrior, begins to lose ground to the Trojan forces until Petroclus dons Achilles's armor, fighting and dying in his place. Grief-stricken, Achilles reenters the fray and Troy is conquered. Barker gives the ancient tale of the ten-year-long siege and inevitable fall of Troy new life by presenting the women's point of view, showing women as the most vulnerable, and in many ways, most courageous victims of war. Readers will come away from this brilliant, beautifully written novel convinced that the so-called glorious death in battle is less important than the strength and determination required to survive against all odds. VERDICT Both lyrical and brutal, Barker's novel is not to savor delicately but rather to be devoured in great bloody gulps. A must read! [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18; "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 8/18.]—Jane Henriksen Baird, formerly at Anchorage P.L., AK

Booker Prize-winning Barker, who set her celebrated "Regeneration" trilogy during World War I, here reaches back in time to the Trojan War, when women served mainly as slaves or prostitutes or laid out the dead. At the heart of the narrative is not the battle between Greeks and Trojans but between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis, once queen of a kingdom neighboring Troy and now Achilles's concubine after he murdered her husband and brothers.

Barker, author of the Booker-winning The Ghost Road, speculates about the fate of the women taken captive during the Trojan War, as related in Homer's Iliad. Briseis, queen of the small country of Lyrnessus, was captured by the Greek forces and awarded to Achilles, fated to serve him as slave and concubine. Through her eyes readers see the horror of war: the sea of blood and corpses, the looting, and the drunken aftermath of battle. When Agamemnon demands that Briseis be handed over to him, Achilles reacts with rage and refuses to fight, and when his foster brother and lover Patrocles is killed, having gone into battle in Achilles's stead, Briseis becomes the unwitting catalyst of a turning point in the war. In Barker's hands, the conflict takes on a new dimension, with revisionist portraits of Achilles ("we called him the butcher") and Patroclus (he had "taken his mother's place" in Achilles's heart). Despite its strong narrative line and transportive scenes of ancient life, however, this novel lacks the lyrical cadences and magical intensity of Madeline Miller's Circe, another recent revising of Greek mythology. The use of British contemporary slang in the dialogue is jarring, and detracts from the story's intensity. Yet this remains a suspenseful and moving illumination of women's fates in wartime. (Sept.)