The Silence of the Girls

July 9, 2018
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.

This extraordinary collaboration between the Booker Prize-winning novelist Pat Barker and superb narrators Kristin Atherton and Michael Fox reimagines the passionate, bloody, mythic Trojan War of Homer's ILIAD. Once begun, you will want to abandon everything to spend time with Fox's "Great" Achilles (aka The Butcher) and Atherton's Briseis, a Trojan queen become his bed-slave. Barker's vivid rendering summons fabled names and nobodies to the mighty and petty human drama of Troy's siege. Atherton, who carries most of the narrative, offers imaginative, vivid characterizations and narrates in a fervent, crisp, fierce voice as Briseis balances the demands of men and gods with the needs and terrors of captured women. Fox's chapters in Achilles's educated, vehement voice are a perfect counterpoint. This is a must-listen. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine