The Silence of the Girls: The Women of Troy Speak Up

I love classical mythology but Homer's Iliad never held much appeal for me. Men waging bitter war over a beautiful woman, with long odes to ships and Greek fighting prowess, topped off with the praises of the great Achilles? Yawn. When I took Classical Mythology 104 in college, I asked my professor what she thought of the movie Troy, and she looked at me in horror and said it was Hollywood garbage. However, I like to think that if I asked her what she thought of Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, she would say she loved this book with all her heart. I certainly did.

The Iliad begins, "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles..." Right off the bat, we know this is a story about the anger of men and gods. But in The Silence of the Girls, we get the story of the enslaved Trojan women, the "prizes" of war, forced to witness the slaughter of their husbands, fathers, and sons, and then pressed into service for the very men who killed their families. In particular, this is the story of Briseis, the Trojan princess who became Achilles' slave and concubine. In the movie Troy, Briseis and Achilles are played by gorgeous actors and make sweet, sweet love. In this novel, Briseis is rightfully depicted as a victim of war, raped by her captors and always fearing for her life and the lives of the women around her. Towards the end of the novel she muses on how people of the future will hear about the tale of Troy and says, "They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. The won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps?" Well, Pat Barker isn't here to give you a soft love story. This is a story of war, and the anger of Briseus's daughter, Briseis. 

This novel is filled with gorgeous, riveting prose that brings the Trojan war to life. I recognized all the familiar names, but now they had rich internal lives, not just poetic epithets that glossed over their emotions and only emphasized their victories. While the focus of the story is Briseis, we get plenty of backstory on Achilles, an emotional wreck of a man who is absolutely destroyed when his friend and lover, Patroclus, is killed in his stead. He has abandonment  issues with his immortal mother, the sea goddess, Thetis, who Briseis reminds him of (which makes the whole thing creepily incestuous). And all throughout, we have Briseis, delivering a traumatic tale of shock, guilt, remorse, and survival. When Patroclus is kind to her, she feels conflicting loyalties. When the Greek armies start losing to the Trojans, she doesn't know how to feel: on the one hand, she wants the Trojans to win. On the other, she knows that this simply means she will be traded as a war prize to a new set of captors, who will not care that she was Trojan to begin with - now she is just a slave, a thing. 

In one memorable chapter, she starts naming the men that Achilles kills on a particularly bloody day and details the gruesome ways in which they were killed. However, she then tells the stories she heard from their mothers about who these men and boys really were. Instead of "Dryops. A sword swipe to the neck that very nearly took off his head," she tells us about, "Dryops, whose mother's labour lasted two full days." It is a story about humanizing the statistics of war and further emphasizes the futility of this nine-year catastrophe that was kicked off solely because one man stole another man's wife. Men are monsters, and this novels illustrates the toll that their arrogance takes on the women and children who are the innocent bystanders. 

I know it all sounds horribly dreary, but The Silence of the Girls is certainly one of the best books I read this year. Evocative, haunting, and rich, it tells an age-old story from a completely fresh perspective and immersed me into Homer's world in a way that I never thought possible. The next time I pick up The Iliad, I will be reading between the lines, searching for the names of those silent women. They are not just Priam's daughter, Hector's wife, Achilles' slave. They are Polyxena, Andromache, Briseis. "Oh, those fierce young women."