“Silence becomes a woman.” Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.
I've recently been enjoying those books that put women's voices into the epics – from Colm Tóibín's House of Names to Madeline Miller's Circe – and although I had been warned that The Silence of the Girls has some literary failings, I was still interested in reading how Pat Barker would handle the story of the enslaved females held by the Greek army during the siege of Troy. I now see these failings – and would agree that the storytelling here didn't reach the potential of the idea – but I'm still glad to have read this; to have participated in breaking the silence for these girls and women.
Looking back, it seemed to me I'd been trying to escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles's story; and I'd failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story – his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn't matter. Here I was, again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no real part to play in it.The story is initially told from the first person perspective of Briseis: she was the wife of King Mynes, ruler of the Trojan city of Lyrnessus, when the city was sacked by Achilles and his men. As so often happens in these heroic battles of yore, every man and boy in the city was killed, along with every pregnant woman in case she was carrying a future soldier, and all of the girls and women were placed into slavery – the pretty ones becoming concubines; Briseis herself a special war prize for Achilles's own uses. Raised in this world, Briseis accepts her fate with silence, but she does initially wonder if she would have been better off throwing herself from the ramparts as the Greeks overran Lyrnessus, as did some of the other frightened women. Because we're essentially being retold The Iliad from Briseis' perspective, we get to see what the women in the camp were up to while their captors went off to battle – the weaving, the laundry, the care of the wounded (and how hard would it be not to cheer for every Trojan arrow sticking out of your rapists' bodies?) – but because Briseis was royalty and now lives with “the greatest of the Greeks”, hers isn't quite the common fate.
Those familiar with The Iliad will recognise when a dispute over the ownership of Briseis causes a rift between Achilles and the commander of the Greek forces, Agamemnon, and in order to show what the men were up to while Briseis couldn't possibly bear witness to the action, the narrative eventually shifts to a third person POV that rotates between several men (including Achilles and his close confidante, Patroclus, Agamemnon, and King Priam of Troy) and then back to Briseis. I didn't really like the effect of this, and especially because as Briseis is obviously telling her story to someone long after the fact (and using frequently jarring effects like, “I’d survived. We-ell, in a manner of speaking I’d survived.”), she uses a passive voice while the men – most of whom are soon to die – have thoughts that are active and urgent: this does little to make Briseis the most interesting character in her own story.
I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, in all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.For a book that seems intentioned to bear witness to the “rape camps”, the sexual violence in this story is more implied than shown (except for some weird Oedipal rage that Achilles works out for his mother – the sea goddess Thetis – against Briseis' body when she comes to bed smelling of the sea). And even Briseis' reaction to being passed on to Agamemnon (not that she had a choice) was frustratingly passive in her later retelling: “So what did he do that was so terrible? Nothing much, I suppose, nothing I hadn't been expecting.” It's one thing to have chosen survival and act compliant and silent in the moment, but where's the anger in the retelling years later? What I loved about books like Circe or Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia is that their authors took female characters from the epics and, based on only the few lines afforded to them, stretched these women out to human form with entire childhoods, personalities, and interior lives. Barker gives us Briseis' viewpoint on the final months of the Trojan War, but we never really learn who she is; she never becomes the main character in her own story and that's wasted potential to me.
We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams – and in their worst nightmares too.So I suppose that's the point of not throwing oneself off the ramparts: the raped women will give birth to Greek sons, but raise them on Trojan lullabies; the women were never silent after all, just quietly keeping their stories alive in the dim of the nurseries where the heroes deign not to tread. I am happy to have read this book, as it adds to an area of personal interest, but I do think it could have been done better.
