The Silence of the Girls

Pat Barker offers up a retelling of Homer's Illiad from the perspective of 19 year old Briseis who sparked the fight between the mighty Achilles and Agamemnon, King of men. It's the latest in female led interpretations of the classics that's just so hot right now with Madeline Miller's Circe and Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey.

After the sacking of Lynessus, Briseis is offered to Achilles as a war prize. Her story seems an answer to the line Priam utters in the Iliad, pleading with Achilles to return his son's Hector's body to him. Escorted into the Greek camp by Hermes he falls to his knees and says, “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.”

When Briseis echoes that statement she does so with a bit more force. “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

And while I'm thankful for the arms distance remove the story is often written in, it can almost approach impassive. Barker does occasionally brings the focus in and it's justly unsettling. From Achilles' spear piercing Briseis' brother's neck as he lay wriggling like a stuck pig as Briseis watches. This warrants barely any attention from Achilles as he fastidiously puts his foot on his neck to pull out his spear. And when Agamemnon takes Briseis as his own, he shows his contempt and ownership of her by hurling a gob of phlegm into her mouth.

The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, the camp of war brides and slaves, Achilles communing with his goddess mother all lacked the heft I was hoping for. The personal stakes seemed diffused under the haze of hoary legend and Briseis' defiant sounding ending seemed unbelievably sad and ironic.