The Silence Of The Girls

In the narrow Lanes of Lyrnessus Achilles is leading his men as they ransack the Trojan city in revenge for the kidnapping of Helen. Once all the men are killed the women are taken to the Greek soldiers’ camp as slaves. Briseis the queen is given as a prize to Achilles, the man who butchered her family and it’s her story that’s central to this retelling of The Iliad.

I found this shocking and upsetting but incredibly compelling, the domestic lives of the women and their children amidst the biblical brutality of bored and frustrated warriors.

As the terror of the first few days goes by Briseis gets to know the other ‘prizes’ and it’s interesting to see how their relationships with their captors differ- some give advice on ‘how to make the best of things’ , others have given birth and are sure love has developed. And the men too are different, the grotesqueness of Agamemnon is matched by the kindness shown by Petroclus, but Briseis is a shrewd commentator always watching and aware of her situation.

She watches the common women tending fires and carrying cooking pots waiting for the warriors to return. They are the most wretched, living around the fires and sleeping under the huts. They’re women given to the men for their common use, and she knows that she could so easily become one of them. Her voice is bitter and hard, brutal even as she describes the savagery, but this is mixed with some often beautiful lines from the narrator, like this paragraph:

‘Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment. He rarely, if ever, thinks about the future, because there is no future. It’s amazing how easily he’s come to accept that. His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away. From somewhere – perhaps from Priam – he seems to have acquired an old man’s acceptance of death. He knows there’s no future and he really doesn’t mind.’

I thought this mixing up of styles kept the reading really fresh, and while I never thought Pat Barker was being in any way sympathetic towards the men, she was able to show the complexity of humans that made her camp life seem so real and made a really absorbing read.

The Triumph of Achilles by Franz von Matsch (1861-1942).